Btrfs RAID Support For RAID 5/6 Is Improving

Of the RAID 0/1/5/6/1+0 levels supported natively by the Btrfs file-system, it's been the RAID 5 and RAID 6 implementations that have been deemed experimental and not yet production ready. Fortunately, that may soon be changing with some fresh Btrfs tool patches.

Miao Xie posted a set of nine Btrfs patches on Friday that provide device scrub/replace support for RAID 5/6. The scrub/replace support has been one of the missing features from deeming these RAID levels ready for production use. This implementation is similar to the other RAID types.

More details on the Btrfs scrub/replace support for RAID 5/6 can be found via these linux-btrfs patch series.

For those that missed it in recent weeks I've been doing a lot of Linux RAID testing including: Btrfs On 4 x Intel SSDs In RAID 0/1/5/6/10, Btrfs RAID: Built-In/Native RAID vs. Mdadm, and Btrfs/EXT4/XFS/F2FS RAID 0/1/5/6/10 Linux Benchmarks On Four SSDs. Overall the Btrfs RAID support is working out very well with modern Linux kernel releases.