Fedora switching to BTRFS
Fedora 33 is the target version for making BTRFS the default FS.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/BtrfsByDefault
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/BtrfsByDefault
Detailed Description
Fedora desktop edition/spin variants will switch to using Btrfs as the filesystem by default for new installs. Labs derived from these variants inherit this change, and other editions may opt into this change.
The change is based on the installer's custom partitioning Btrfs preset. It's been well tested for 7 years.
Current partitioning
vg/root LV mounted at / and a vg/home LV mounted at /home. These are separate file system volumes, with separate free/used space.
Proposed partitioning
root subvolume mounted at / and home subvolume mounted at /home. Subvolumes don't have size, they act mostly like directories, space is shared.
Unchanged
/boot will be a small ext4 volume. A separate boot is needed to boot dm-crypt sysroot installations; it's less complicated to keep the layout the same, regardless of whether sysroot is encrypted. There will be no automatic snapshots/rollbacks.
If you select to encrypt your data, LUKS (dm-crypt) will be still used as it is today (with the small difference that Btrfs is used instead of LVM+Ext4). There is upstream work on getting native encryption for Btrfs that will be considered once ready and is subject of a different change proposal in a future Fedora release.
...
Current status
...
Red Hat doesn't support Btrfs? Can Fedora do this?
Red Hat supports Fedora well, in many ways. But Fedora already works closely with, and depends on, upstreams. And this will be one of them. That's an important consideration for this proposal. The community has a stake in ensuring it is supported. Red Hat will never support Btrfs if Fedora rejects it. Fedora necessarily needs to be first, and make the persuasive case that it solves more problems than alternatives. Feature owners believe it does, hands down.
The Btrfs community has users that have been using it for most of the past decade at scale. It's been the default on openSUSE (and SUSE Linux Enterprise) since 2014, and Facebook has been using it for all their OS and data volumes, in their data centers, for almost as long. Btrfs is a mature, well-understood, and battle-tested file system, used on both desktop/container and server/cloud use-cases. We do have developers of the Btrfs filesystem maintaining and supporting the code in Fedora, one is a Change owner, so issues that are pinned to Btrfs can be addressed quickly.
Fedora desktop edition/spin variants will switch to using Btrfs as the filesystem by default for new installs. Labs derived from these variants inherit this change, and other editions may opt into this change.
The change is based on the installer's custom partitioning Btrfs preset. It's been well tested for 7 years.
Current partitioning
vg/root LV mounted at / and a vg/home LV mounted at /home. These are separate file system volumes, with separate free/used space.
Proposed partitioning
root subvolume mounted at / and home subvolume mounted at /home. Subvolumes don't have size, they act mostly like directories, space is shared.
Unchanged
/boot will be a small ext4 volume. A separate boot is needed to boot dm-crypt sysroot installations; it's less complicated to keep the layout the same, regardless of whether sysroot is encrypted. There will be no automatic snapshots/rollbacks.
If you select to encrypt your data, LUKS (dm-crypt) will be still used as it is today (with the small difference that Btrfs is used instead of LVM+Ext4). There is upstream work on getting native encryption for Btrfs that will be considered once ready and is subject of a different change proposal in a future Fedora release.
...
Current status
- Targeted release: Fedora 33
- Last updated: 2020-10-26
- FESCo issue: #2429
- Tracker bug: #1851166
- Release notes tracker: #530
...
Red Hat doesn't support Btrfs? Can Fedora do this?
Red Hat supports Fedora well, in many ways. But Fedora already works closely with, and depends on, upstreams. And this will be one of them. That's an important consideration for this proposal. The community has a stake in ensuring it is supported. Red Hat will never support Btrfs if Fedora rejects it. Fedora necessarily needs to be first, and make the persuasive case that it solves more problems than alternatives. Feature owners believe it does, hands down.
The Btrfs community has users that have been using it for most of the past decade at scale. It's been the default on openSUSE (and SUSE Linux Enterprise) since 2014, and Facebook has been using it for all their OS and data volumes, in their data centers, for almost as long. Btrfs is a mature, well-understood, and battle-tested file system, used on both desktop/container and server/cloud use-cases. We do have developers of the Btrfs filesystem maintaining and supporting the code in Fedora, one is a Change owner, so issues that are pinned to Btrfs can be addressed quickly.