[Btrfs-devel] Current release plan

[Chris Mason]

Hello everyone,

I had some help reviewing Btrfs disk format this week and now have
a list of some key disk format changes.

So, my plan is to cut a new release out of the btrfs-unstable tree
(also pushing the changes into the stable tree) and then start on these
changes:

* Explicit back pointers for every reference count.  This is a key part
of online fsck and will require adding a new item type to the extent
allocation tree. 

* Generation number in all forward pointers, allowing verification of
objects once we find them on disk.  This includes node pointers in the
btree and directory item pointers.

* Objectid allocation tree to allow unique inode numbers across
subvolumes.  Crucial for NFS and a few other things.

* Add a 32 bit device id to block pointers, which will get used for
storage pools.

* Align and optimize existing disk format structs.

Most of these are actually pretty small, and I'll try to stabilize
things quickly.  If you have a suggestion on changing the disk format,
please let me know.

-chris