11.04 B1 Btrfs

[Kent Borg]

BITCHING:

Since I saw a talk on btrfs at Linuxcon last summer I have been very 
intrigued, and waiting for userland tools to catch up.

Then I saw there was a thread on btrfs, cool, maybe there is some real 
support in the next Ubuntu release. Today I finally got around to 
checking out the discussion.

Alas, it is one of the most worthless threads I have ever seen. I was 
hoping for some specific content, yet the most on-topic post was an 
annoying referral to Google--a frequently unbounded exercise. Annoying. 
(Why not set up a bot that just keeps saying "Google that"; isn't Google 
always a good idea?) I am perfectly aware of Google, yet I still 
subscribe to this Ubuntu list because I hope for more *specific* 
content. You know, content with a little value added.


CONTENT:

And now the thread is nearly two-dozen posts long, and still no content. 
So let me add some...

It seems btrfs can't work for swap files because swap doesn't like 
sparse files (that is, files with holes for unused parts), and btrfs 
naturally does holes. I forget why btrfs naturally does holes (because 
it refers common parts back to earlier versions?), and this thread 
hasn't shown any light on that. I can say that btrfs is all about 
snapshots, and doing a snapshot of a swap file doesn't seem to make much 
sense, and so putting a swap file in a btrfs volume seems silly.


BACK TO BITCHING:

And while I am at it, seeing how this thread is mostly about bitching, 
let me add my own: Javascript is evil, most of the security holes on the 
net would be prevented if people didn't have Javascript enabled (which 
is not Java, and was never designed with security in mind). The "aren't 
I a clever git, I can post a long URL to a Google search"-link doesn't 
work without Javascript turned on. At least not with my copy of Firefox 
on my copy of Ubuntu at my location on the internet. If you are going to 
be all clever about posting a link, craft your link more carefully. 
Javascript is almost as big a security hole as auto-execute on CD-ROMs. 
I suppose you like auto-execute, too.


Jeeze! Let us spend our energy on content. Interesting content is much 
more fun than posting Google URLs or bitching about such annoying behavior.


-kb, the Kent who thinks btrfs is up-and-coming yet doesn't see any 
content on this list about btrfs on 11.04.