Features/F16BtrfsDefaultFs

= Fedora 16 BTRFS default file system =

Summary
Make BTRFS the default file system for normal installs.

Owner

 * Name: Josef Bacik


 * Email: josef@redhat.com

Current status

 * Targeted release: Fedora 16
 * Last updated: 2011-06-01
 * Percentage of completion: 0%

Detailed Description
Make BTRFS the default file system for new installations of Fedora, and use BTRFS's built in volume management capabilities instead of LVM.

Benefit to Fedora
BTRFS includes many features that do not exist in any other file system that are highly valuable to normal users, including


 * Checksumming
 * Snapshotting
 * Built in volume management and RAID

Checksumming give our users better data integrity, and snapshotting allows us to do thing's like take snapshots of the file system before doing potentially dangerous things, like yum updates, in order to provide a position to roll back to.

Scope

 * Anaconda - not terribly important but would be good to expose some of the different features of BTRFS via anaconda.
 * Subvolume support (for /home by default)
 * Optional compression
 * RAID support
 * Ext3/4 conversion
 * GRUB - would be good to have GRUB support for BTRFS, but if not we'd need to make sure Anaconda creates a /boot partition with ext3/4 so we can boot. (Grub2 or syslinux can natively boot btrfs)
 * LiveCD tools - these would need to be reworked to create a BTRFS image to install with.

How To Test
It should be simple enough to test, just do a normal install. If Anaconda gets support for the different BTRFS capabilities we'd want to test a couple of cases


 * Single disk BTRFS
 * Multi-disk BTRFS, RAID0/1/10
 * Creating different subvolumes in the install

User Experience
The change should be largely invisible to users. They will just be able to take advantage of the different features that BTRFS has if they so choose.

Dependencies

 * GRUB
 * Anaconda
 * LiveCD tools

Contingency Plan
We can just keep ext4 as the default installed file system.

Documentation

 * | Btrfs Wiki

Release Notes
There shouldn't be anything we need to specifically say other than hi-light the change.

Comments and Discussion

 * See Talk:Features/F16BtrfsDefaultFs
 * BZ: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=689509