SUSE Continues Working On Transactional Updates With Btrfs

While Red Hat and several other Linux vendors have either deprecated Btrfs support or at least not embraced it like they originally talked up this "next-gen file-system" years ago, SUSE has continued supporting Btrfs both with openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise.

SUSE continues shipping openSUSE/SLE with Btrfs on the root file-system and through that have been offering up some nifty features, including support for transactional updates.

Ignaz Forster of SUSE presented at this past week's Linux Foundation Open-Source Summit with transactional updates built atop Btrfs and RPMs. These atomic and roll-back-capable updates are achieved with SUSE's Snapper tool for creating Btrfs snapshots though it also supports LVM/EXT4 too and is called by the zypper/YaST updating tools. It's through these pre and post update operation file-system snapshots that these transactional updates are possible.

This means of transactional updates is currently supported in openSUSE Tumbleweed, openSUSE Leap 15, openSUSE Kubic, and SUSE CaaS Platform while they are still working on the roll-out for SLES 15.

Those that were not at the Open-Source Summit and wanting to learn more about this Snapper updating tech can see this PDF slide deck.