Fedora 16 will use Btrfs as default filesystem

Linux Weekly News notifies:

At the June 8 meeting of the Fedora engineering steering committee (FESCo), the group decided that Fedora 16 will ship with Btrfs as its default filesystem. Btrfs is a relatively new copy-on-write filesystem with many interesting features such as read-only and writeable snapshots, multiple device support for RAID, online filesystem defragmentation, and more, though it is still marked as experimental in the kernel. “AGREED: Feature is approved. Will add some base critera to the page to be met by feature freeze. This is just a swap of ext4 to btrfs for default, not change of lvm or other parts of default.“

As noted in the comments, Btrfs is marked as an experimental feature in the kernel.  As also noted in the comments, many other features which were marked as experimental were brought into production and that seemed to work fine.

While I personally have no knowledge of Btrfs stability or readiness for production, I am slightly worried by that move.  First of all, ext4 – current default filesystem – works fine for me and for everyone I know.  Why fixing something that works? It seems that Btrfs is a better choice for server platforms.  And while Fedora is mostly used on the desktop, it is still a testing platform for Red Hat distribution which is, in fact, a server-oriented line of products.

On another note, Fedora 15 upgrade was a bumpy ride. Again, not just for me, but for everyone I know.  Switch to Gnome3, sysctl, and other changes didn’t quite work out of the box for many people.  Btrfs might do the same.  I think it’s better to push such a change at least to Fedora 17.  Let people recover slightly.  Focus instead on fixing things which are broken.  Let people regain confidence in Fedora distribution and its upgrade paths.  Please.