From btrfs Wiki

Note: this page is protected and cannot be edited by all users: edits must be approved, this page reflects status of the whole project





Overview

For a list of features by their introduction, please see the table Changelog#By_feature.

The table below aims to serve as an overview for the stability status of the features BTRFS supports. While a feature may be functionally safe and reliable, it does not necessarily mean that its useful, for example in meeting your performance expectations for your specific workload. Combination of features can vary in performance, the table does not cover all possibilities.

The table is based on the latest released linux kernel: 5.8

The columns for each feature reflrect the status of the implementation in following ways:

Stability - completeness of the implementation, usecase coverage

Status since - kernel version when the status has been last changed

Performance - how much it could be improved until the inherent limits are hit

Notes - short description of the known issues, or other information related to status

Legend:

OK : should be safe to use, no known major defficiencies

: should be safe to use, no known major defficiencies mostly OK : safe for general use, there are some known problems that do not affect majority of users

: safe for general use, there are some known problems that do not affect majority of users Unstable: do not use for other then testing purposes, known severe problems, missing implementation of some core parts





Note to editors:

This page reflects status of the whole project and edits need to be approved by one of the maintainers (kdave). Suggest edits if:

there's a known missing entry

a particular feature combination that has a different status and is worth mentioning separately

you knouw of a bug that lowers the feature status

a reference could be enhanced by an actual link to documentation (wiki, manual pages)

Details that do not fit the table

Defrag

The data affected by the defragmentation process will be newly written and will consume new space, the links to the original extents will not be kept. See also Manpage/btrfs-filesystem. Though autodefrag affects newly written data, it can read a few adjacent blocks (up to 64k) and write the contiguous extent to a new location. The adjacent blocks will be unshared. This happens on a smaller scale than the on-demand defrag and doesn't have the same impact.

Free space tree

btrfs-progs support is read-only, ie. fsck can check the filesystem but is not able to keep the FST consistent and thus cannot run in repair mode

the free space tree can be cleared using 'btrfs check --clear-space-cache v2' and will be rebuilt at next mount

Compatibility and historical references:

btrfs-progs versions before v4.7.3 might accidentally do writes to the filesystem, but since there's no way to invalidate the FST, this causes inconsistency and possible corruption (using a piece of space twice). If you have made changes (btrfstune, repair, ...) to a FST enabled filesystem with btrfs progs, then mount with clear_cache,space_cache=v2 and hope the space written to was not reused yet. (see Status of free-space-tree feature)

you have made changes (btrfstune, repair, ...) to a FST enabled filesystem with btrfs progs, then mount with clear_cache,space_cache=v2 and hope the space written to was not reused yet. (see Status of free-space-tree feature) (fixed in linux 4.9) runtime support: fine on little-endian machines (x86*), known to be broken on big-endian (sparc64), see sparc64: btrfs module fails to load on big-endian machines

Out of band dedupe

File extents can be shared either due to snapshotting or reflink. As the number of owners of an extent grows, the time to process or modify the extent will also grow.

The deduplication increases the level of sharing and reduces data usage.

File range cloning

See the intro paragraph in Out of band dedupe. The range cloning increases the extent sharing.

RAID1, RAID10

The simple redundancy RAID levels utilize different mirrors in a way that does not achieve the maximum performance. The logic can be improved so the reads will spread over the mirrors evenly or based on device congestion.

RAID56

Some fixes went to 4.12, namely scrub and auto-repair fixes. Feature marked as mostly OK for now.

Further fixes to raid56 related code are applied each release. The write hole is the last missing part, preliminary patches have been posted but needed to be reworked. The parity not checksummed note has been removed.

Device replace

Device replace and device delete insist on being able to read or reconstruct all data. If any read fails due to an IO error, the delete/replace operation is aborted and the administrator must remove or replace the damaged data before trying again.

Other

On-disk format

The filesystem disk format is stable. This means it is not expected to change unless there are very strong reasons to do so. If there is a format change, filesystems which implement the previous disk format will continue to be mountable and usable by newer kernels.

The core of the on-disk format that comprises building blocks of the filesystem:

layout of the main data structures, eg. superblock, b-tree nodes, b-tree keys, block headers

the COW mechanism, based on the original design of Ohad Rodeh's paper "Shadowing and clones"

Newly introduced features build on top of the above and could add specific structures. If a backward compatibility is not possible to maintain, a bit in the filesystem superblock denotes that and the level of incompatibility (full, read-only mount possible).