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Kernel Coverage: btrfs, OpenZFS, and Chaff in Commits
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John Goerzen ☛ btrfs on a Raspberry Pi
I’m something of a filesystem geek, I guess. I first wrote about ZFS on Linux 14 years ago, and even before I used ZFS, I had used ext2/3/4, jfs, reiserfs, xfs, and no doubt some others.
I’ve also used btrfs. I last posted about it in 2014, when I noted it has some advantages over ZFS, but also some drawbacks, including a lot of kernel panics.
Since that comparison, ZFS has gained trim support and btrfs has stabilized. The btrfs status page gives you an accurate idea of what is good to use on btrfs.
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University of Toronto ☛ How I think OpenZFS's 'written' and 'written@' dataset properties work
Yesterday I wrote some notes about ZFS's 'written' dataset property, where the short summary is that 'written' reports the amount of space written in a snapshot (ie, that wasn't in the previous snapshot), and 'written@<snapshot>' reports the amount of space written since the specified snapshot (up to either another snapshot or the current state of the dataset). In that entry, I left un-researched the question of how ZFS actually gives us those numbers; for example, if there was a mechanism in place similar to the complicated one for 'used' space. I've now looked into this and as far as I can see the answer is that ZFS determines information on the fly.
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ZDNet ☛ Linus Torvalds warns Linux devs: Stop cluttering patches with automated, useless links
It all started with a single fix to a resource node rewrite in the Linux kernel. The more Linus Torvalds looked at it, the more puzzled he became. You see, the fix didn't "actually fix anything at all."
Then, Torvalds explained, he spotted the "promising 'Link:' argument that I hoped would explain why this pointless commit exists, but AS ALWAYS that link only wasted my time by pointing to the same damn information that was already there."