https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bgpepiHacker News RSShttps://hnrss.org/hnrss v2.1.1Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:20:47 +0000A Brief Word About Btrfs A fair-minded reader will point out that Linux has its own copy-on-write filesystem: Btrfs. And openSUSE's integration of Btrfs with Snapper deserves genuine credit. Snapper, developed by Arvin Schnell at SUSE and first shipped with openSUSE 12.1 in November 2011, creates automatic snapshots in pre/post pairs around every zypper transaction. GRUB is patched to offer a submenu for booting from snap‐ shots. The rollback workflow is coherent: reboot, select the snapshot, verify, run snapper rollback , reboot again. On openSUSE, this works out of the box. The caveats are worth mentioning. Btrfs's RAID5 and RAID6 implementations still carry an official data loss warning in the documentation, a caveat that has per‐ sisted for years. ZFS's equivalent (RAIDZ, RAIDZ2, RAIDZ3) has been production- ready since 2005. Btrfs has no equivalent to zfs send and zfs receive for efficient incremental replication between hosts. And while Btrfs reached general production readiness around 2015, ZFS had a decade's head start. None of this makes Btrfs a bad filesystem. It makes it a younger one. And the openSUSE team deserves genuine credit for building what they have built. But even in the best case, the Btrfs workflow on openSUSE is a distribution-level achievement. It is SUSE's integration work on top of a filesystem, a bootloader, and a snapshot manager that are all developed separately. The GRUB integration is openSUSE-specific; other distributions using Snapper do not get the boot-from- snapshot feature without additional patching. The whole edifice is one team's excel‐ lent work within the assembled model. On FreeBSD, it is one team, one repository, one design, one release.

]]>Mon, 27 Apr 2026 19:15:26 +0000https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47925968bgpepihttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47925968https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47925968Yes FreeBSD has, but there are things that the team around project must clean, more about security. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32506675

]]>Wed, 02 Aug 2023 16:53:42 +0000https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36973476bgpepihttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36973476https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36973476