Red Hat Appears To Be Abandoning Their Btrfs Hopes

Written by Michael Larabel in Red Hat on 1 August 2017 at 01:39 PM EDT. 123 Comments
RED HAT
Red Hat has (again) deprecated the Btrfs file-system from their Red Hat Enterprise Linux product, but this time it appears it may be for good.

Longtime Phoronix readers will recall when we noticed that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 deprecated Btrfs, which was later clarified as just being for RHEL6 while RHEL7 would continue to see Btrfs support. Red Hat has now deprecated Btrfs from RHEL7 and is looking like it won't be supported for future releases, e.g. RHEL 8.

A Phoronix reader pointed it out from the release notes from today's Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 update:
Btrfs has been deprecated

The Btrfs file system has been in Technology Preview state since the initial release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Red Hat will not be moving Btrfs to a fully supported feature and it will be removed in a future major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The Btrfs file system did receive numerous updates from the upstream in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 and will remain available in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 series. However, this is the last planned update to this feature.

Red Hat will continue to invest in future technologies to address the use cases of our customers, specifically those related to snapshots, compression, NVRAM, and ease of use. We encourage feedback through your Red Hat representative on features and requirements you have for file systems and storage technology.

That is much more clear than their 6.8 deprecation announcement from May 2016. I've reached out to a few of the hat wearing developers this morning but have not heard back yet with any further clarification, etc.

This news isn't too surprising though with Red Hat not really pushing Btrfs recently and the efforts by the Red Hat employed Fedora developers to switch to Btrfs as the default file-system has fizzled away as well. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 is the main enterprise Linux distribution so far using Btrfs by default while most other distributions offer Btrfs as a non-default file-system option.
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