[Btrfs-devel] BTRFS and old kernels.

[Bron Gondwana]

On Sun, Apr 06, 2008 at 10:57:12AM +1000, Bron Gondwana wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 05, 2008 at 08:13:47PM +0100, Miguel Sousa Filipe wrote:
> > My question is, is there sill interestest in having btrfs compatible
> > with older kernels (like, 2.6.20 or 2.6.18)?
> > I'll post (or repost) patches that I need for btrfs-unstable to
> > build/work on this ppc system of mine.
> 
> It sort of depends who you ask.  Personally, I see value in being
> compatible with as wide range of kernels as possible in a development
> filesystem that you want people to be testing.  But then I'm not
> doing any btrfs development, so I don't count for much.

I guess I should justify this a bit....

ASSUME: I have a bunch of production Debian Etch machines running
        the latest Debian Etch production kernel (2.6.18-6-amd64 
        sounds like a convincing sort of version number) and I want
        to benchmark/test btrfs in my environment.

CASE 1: I can upgrade the kernel on this system to 2.6.24+ and make
        sure all my hardware still works as expected, upgrade my 
        udev/hal/whatever to be compatible.  Possibly backport some
        userland tools that use new interfaces now... sounds like
        a whole pile of fun^H^H^Hwork.

CASE 2: I can build a standalone btrfs module against my current
        kernel and test, having changed nothing but the filesystem.


I know which one I would trust to give me a better idea of how
stable/performant[1] btrfs is on my platform.


(this all assuming that there aren't architectural changes in the
 intervening layers that make btrfs not work properly on the older
 kernels, but ext3/xfs/jfs/reiserfs/name-your-poison seem to have
 all remained stable right through those transitions[2].)

Bron.


[1] screw you http://boulter.com/blog/2004/08/19/performant-is-not-a-word/
    and friends...
        
[2] ok, there have been some exceptions to that, for example:
    http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/faq.html#dir2