The main Btrfs developer, Chris Mason, has issued a new release of the btrfs-progs. Although the main btrfs management tool still identifies itself as version v0.19, it now contains the relatively new scrub function. This function was previously only included in btrfs-progs developer versions and has, therefore, been missing in most Linux distributions that incorporated Btrfs. Scrubbing involves reading and checking all data and metadata of a Btrfs system so that hardware and software errors can be detected early.

The source code of the new tools is available in a Git repository at kernel.org. In addition to the usual developer tools, compiling the source code requires the libuuid and libattr library files and headers (uuid-dev and libattr-dev for Debian and Ubuntu, libuuid.devel and libattr-devel for Fedora). However, the sensible fsck tool Mason had originally hoped to present at LinuxCon is still missing; the currently included btrfsck can display internal filesystem errors, but it can't fix them. The absence of a repair tool is the main reason why Fedora 16, scheduled to be released in early November, won't use Btrfs as its default file system.

(djwm)