New Btrfs Free Tutorial and Request for End User Feedback on Btrfs

Those who follow Linux have certainly heard of Btrfs, a relatively new high performance file system that has a lot of people excited about its potential. Two months ago during LinuxCon Japan, we were pleased to sit down with lead developer Chris Mason from Oracle to record a short webinar that focuses on demonstrating RAID5 and RAID6 as well as recently completed features in Btrfs. This tutorial would be valuable to anyone interested in the technical details of the filesystem. Please enjoy this free Btrfs Linux tutorial and let us know your feedback. Also, please enjoy the other free Linux training tutorials available as part of our Linux training program.

But we’re not content just publishing information on Btrfs. At the Linux Foundation’s End User Summit last month, we had great interaction on the new filesystem with the attendees, many of whom are members of our End User Council and who count as some of the largest and most sophisticated users in the world. As a result of the End User Summit, the Btrfs team created a wiki to capture use cases from End Users on Btrfs and to get more of a dialog going with users, since there have been quite a few question on  how to accomplish ZFS tasks in Btrfs, as well as just generic “How do I do X in Btrfs?”. This wiki hopes to capture those questions and end user requirements to improve Btrfs.

This is a great example of the sort of collaboration engendered by the End User Summit. Connect sophisticated users with the developers of the technology and good things happen. We’re pleased to help facilitate this collaboration by hosting the events, inviting the right users and sponsoring travel of the right community developers. Now it will be fun to watch improvements made to the actual code as a result of this type of developer/user collaboration.