back to article Red Hat tips its Fedora 33: Beta release introduces Btrfs as default file system, .NET on ARM64, plus an IoT variant

Red Hat has released Fedora 33 beta, with the finished article expected at the end of this month, as well as version 7.9 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat has two main Linux distributions – Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) – as well as CentOS in its orbit. "Fedora is really the place that we take chances and risks …

  1. Lorribot

    "while reducing the amount of expertise needed to deal with situations like running out of disk space"

    had to laugh, since when has running out of disk space required expertise? Delete the old shit you no longer/never need(ed)/wanted in the first place, or buy a bigger disk.

    1. batfastad

      Maybe you just ran out of inodes and deleted all ur shit for no reason :/

      1. chuckufarley Silver badge

        Or you didn't account for a program that insists on not using syslog and fills up /home with it's logs because one user decided to compile and run the latest dev release without telling anyone.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Or your CEO decides to use company resources to store all his personal photographs, itunes library etc.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      I've had two or three occasions where I've found my microserer (running Ubuntu LTS) had failed to do some updates because it had run out of space on one of the system partitions but had then continued on a regular basis to try further updates ending up with situation where several sets of updates were partiallu applied and none of the "tool based" options for trying to clean up the situation worked as they all failed due to lack of working space on the partitions they wanted to use and needed to spend sometime searching help topics etc to find what I ought to delete to make space to then roll back everything to a state before the problems statrted.

      n.b. "buy bigger disk" was the final solution as when the 250GB "system drive" that came with the Microserver died I replaced it with 500GB (mainly on the basis that smaller disks no longer existed at that point!) and had no similar problems since then!

    3. Steve Graham

      We had an intern who decided to delete all the junk in the trash. That is to say, in the bin, /bin.

    4. Munchausen's proxy
      FAIL

      It's pretty ironic

      "while reducing the amount of expertise needed to deal with situations like running out of disk space"

      BTRFS uses large amounts of disk space without telling 'du' or 'df' about it. In my experience, exactly the opposite of this claim is true. When you get an unexplainable 'out of disk space' error, you can't see anyplace it's gotten to, and it turns out you quickly need to learn about a bunch of infrastructure you never knew was there, expertise is at a premium.

      And that's why I'll never use btrfs again.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: It's pretty ironic

        With the additional bonus of having one of the storage admins kick down your office door when your oh-so-clever-I-am-an-filesystem-and-doing-an-lvm-job-without-being-asked-to BTRFS eats up the thin provisioned storage LUN, thus fucking the entire array.

        Might be useful on a thinkpad, but stick it where the sun doesn't shine for professional use.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Beautiful Desktop

    IMHO Fedora with the default Gnome desktop and theme is probably the most visually appealing Linux desktops I've seen.

    (And on the Dark Side of things, the pentest distro Black Arch is also very striking)

    1. batfastad

      Re: Beautiful Desktop

      I tend to stick to XFCE to keep things rapid but the Fedora cadence and in-place upgrades every 6 months makes it mostly pleasant to run a Linux desktop these days. Though of course it's not for everyone - keep the family on Windows.

      1. Beeblebrox

        keep the family on Windows

        Why punish them?

        1. Soruk

          Re: keep the family on Windows

          Exactly, last Christmas I migrated my mum from Win7 (after it keeled over irreparably) to CentOS 8, with a desktop interface made from IceWM and ROX-Filer. (Her other daily driver is an Acorn RiscPC.) Having been using Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice on Windows, migrating these was a doddle and she had no trouble adjusting to the new reality.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: keep the family on Windows

          It's not really punishment if you properly demonstrate how to use it. Most folks won't even care if it's not Windows as long as they can edit a document, check their email and print things.

          Most average Joe's don't even know the difference between Office and Windows.

          Ask a sample size of 100 average folks what version of Windows they're using and brace yourself for some great answers like:

          "Is that Office?"

          "I don't know"

          "Dell I think"

          "I don't know, it's not Vista though"

          "It's Office 2013"

          For people that call their entire PC "the hard drive" there is no tangible difference between Linux and Windows for everyday light use.

          It is only nerds that can see the major differences.

          The only difference that your average person will notice is that Linux runs considerably faster on their old Core 2 Duo from 2006 than Windows 10 does.

          Put Linux on someones ancient virus infested shit heap PC and you'll make them think they have an entirely new machine.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Beautiful Desktop

        I keep my family on Linux. Way less support overhead.

        My mother in law is in South Africa and I'm in the UK. Ain't no way I'm supporting Windows over laggy remote desktop / TeamViewer at that distance when I can support Linux with MOSH.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Beautiful Desktop

      Gnome 3 is shit.

      I don't need to say any more. But to add to my comment...

      > What the fuck is that stupid thing on the side?

      > How do I get rid of that useless topbar? I want it all on the bottom like I've been used to.

      > These hot corner things are awful.

      > Gedit -- give us the menu again so I can save with alt-f-s.

      > Please, please, please, I NEVER maximise a window as I have this wonderful thing called X-windows. Well it was wonderful...

      I could go on, but what's the point?

      Did I say Gnome 3 is shit?

      1. martynhare

        Re: Beautiful Desktop

        I think it is fair to say GNOME 3 is still very shit when compared to MATE but good when compared to the older GNOME 2. Try dynamically adding and removing monitors of differing resolutions when you have menu bars on multiple screens - you’ll see what I mean. GNOME Shell 4 should fix the performance issues though, as they know they screwed up by making it single threaded the moment you use it as a Wayland compositor. At that point, it will be a very competitive desktop environment.

      2. J27

        Re: Beautiful Desktop

        Use something else, that's the magic of Linux. Many desktop choices. I like it.

      3. bombastic bob Silver badge
        Linux

        Re: Beautiful Desktop

        Did I say Gnome 3 is shit?

        not NEARLY enough times.

        Cinnamon or Mate with a 3D skeuomorphic theme, usually one of the 'classic' ones, seems to work best.

        (why would ANYONE want their Linux machine be more like win-10-nic ... or CHROME ???)

      4. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Beautiful Desktop

        "What the fuck is that stupid thing on the side?"

        Ah the Ubuntu flavour of Gnome 3. That's there interpretation of a dock.

        Gnome3 is only shit if it's been heavily customised by a distro.

        In it's vanilla state it's absolutely fine, I find it to be the most usable DE out there...it stays out of the way.

        "How do I get rid of that useless topbar? I want it all on the bottom like I've been used to."

        There is an extension for that. To be fair though, it makes more sense at the top (especially on higher resolution screens). I feel exactly the same way about the Windows Task Bar at the bottom.

        "These hot corner things are awful."

        Yeah I agree with that, they are easily disabled in the settings though, no big. Not all distros have them on by default.

        "Gedit -- give us the menu again so I can save with alt-f-s."

        Not sure I understand your gripe here. I navigate mostly with the keyboard and I tend to launch gedit either from a terminal window or the "Run a Command" box. I use CTRL+S to save which seems more efficient.

        Based on your keyboard shortcut preferences and your taskbar preferences, I feel I need to recommend Windows 10 to you...it sounds like it might be perfect for you.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Btrfs

    > Advantages include snapshotting, support for very large files, SSD awareness, deduplication, and background error correction

    Disadvantages include that it doesn't work.

    OpenSUSE user here, a superb distro that likes to live dangerously when it comes to default choice of filesystem. Oh well, at least the Btrfs devs are not doing time for murder, so it's an improvement over the previous default.

    1. chuckufarley Silver badge

      Re: Btrfs

      Spoken like some someone that has never used it.

    2. carl0s

      Re: Btrfs

      I think that's harsh. Yes there have been past problems, but for some scenarios it's amazing.

      I believe there are still issues around metadata safety/reliability with raid5, but that's not to say you can't use raid5 for your data (mkfs.btrfs -m raid1 -d raid5). I know there were some curious scenarios in the past like a 2-disk raid1 would not mount if one of the disks was missing or failed. That would worry me especially when you're too busy to have to figure out and learn about 'why won't it work with one disk.. it's a two disk mirror ffs, that's the whole point'. Don't think that's an issue anymore. Last time I looked at quotas they killed my performance, and I was only enabling them to try to get a clear view of snapshot space utilisation.

      I think if you consider the plusses: snapshots work well, compression works well (zstd:2 a big win), the multi disk stuff is super flexible and impressive (and the whole concept of how it deals with multi-disks and errors/failures) and the send/recv stuff, and then maybe put the deduplication and quotas into the 'not quite sure' category.. well, you still end up with a pretty awesome thing. That's where I'm at anyway.

      I've given it some abuse over the last few years and I'm doing ok I think. I ran it atop an md-raid0 for a few years, and now have the above btrfs-raid5 with raid1 metadata. This is for storing backups of Windows servers and esxi boxes. The btrfs snapshots work well for Windows wbadmin since it appends to the same vhdx file each time. Not so well for esxi ghettovcb since they're not incremental. I use snapper. Being read-only snapshots by default is good from a ransomware protection perspective (in case the server doing the wbadmin backups is compromised).

      Being on Fedora is nice because it's pretty much bleeding edge with the kernel and btrfs utils etc.

      Obviously you probably all already know that Netgear (for easily more than 5 years) and Synology (maybe more recently?) Use btrfs on their NAS boxes for snapshots, usually on top of their own (or probably a tweaked md) multi disk raid type thing.

      1. Tomato42

        Re: Btrfs

        snapshots are also problematic when you have a lot of them; fsck requires the system to re-read all metadata for all snapshots, so if you double the number of snapshots, you double the fsck time

      2. chuckufarley Silver badge

        Re: Btrfs

        I prefer the btrfs version of RAID10 to the RAID5 because write speeds are not impacted by CPU usage. I have that same issue with all software RAID5 setups though.

        Four years ago I had my first incarnation of my NAS running ZFS on Linux. When I decided I wanted to switch distros ZoL became a real PITA. So I decided to try btrfs because no matter which distro you use you can modprobe btrfs and mount your data. The biggest down side to btrfs is that (like ZFS) your free space can become very fragmented but if your array gets over 50% full a simple weekly cron job takes care of that.

        As for live, mounted, reading, and writing flexibility, btrfs is way ahead of other filesystems. You can convert from a single disk to RAID(X) or to JBOD on the fly. And then you can convert back again as needed.

        IMHO it's biggest problem currently is that is can't do Data COW for VM images or swap files, which means no FS level compression or check sums for those directories or sub-volumes. So while it's a great FS for NFS and basic NAS you might want to stick with the tried and true for NBD and iSCSI hosts.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Btrfs

      But then again, the developer of the previous FS has a lot of time on his hands...

    4. Smirnov

      Re: Btrfs

      "OpenSUSE user here, a superb distro that likes to live dangerously when it comes to default choice of filesystem."

      Let me guess: you were on Tumbleweed? If so then well, bad luck because Rolling Release distros are, by definition, dangerous.

      However openSUSE Leap 15 is rock solid, and guess what, SLE (SUSE Linux Enterprise) uses BTRFS as default filesystem, too, fully supported at that, too. All our SLES and SLED machines run on BTRFS, and at least the SUSE implementation has not given us one problem.

      You think SUSE would use an (according your statement) "non-working" file system as the default file system for it's money-making Enterprise platform? Yeah, right, think again.

  4. chuckufarley Silver badge
    Pint

    It's good to see...

    ...btrfs get Redhat love again. I have been using it for years on my home brew NAS and it has come a very long way. Yes, it can be very slow at times because there hasn't been any work done to optimize read speeds for most workloads but I can say for sure that it has not eaten my data once. It may or may not have kept a drunken admin from eating their own data as well.

    1. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Devil

      Re: It's good to see...

      I'm all for as many choices as possible, but would have preferred to see ZFS.

      /me using ZFS on FreeBSD for _YEARS_ now, no problems, and it helpfully spotted 2 drives that were about to go bad. BTRFS needs some more "experience" under its belt to become equivalent to what ZFS has already accomplished.

  5. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    btrfs...ugh, oh and i recommend s3qlfs

    "while reducing the amount of expertise needed to deal with situations like running out of disk space"

    "had to laugh, since when has running out of disk space required expertise? Delete the old shit you no longer/never need(ed)/wanted in the first place, or buy a bigger disk."

    You'd think so wouldn't you? Until VERY recently, you could fill a btrfs disk, go to delete something, and find it will not even let you delete anything because (due to journalling or whatever) deletes initially require additional space. Also with deduplication, compression, etc., a deletion may not free space (you delete something, and there's another file with duplicate blocks or a snapshot or whatever.)

    I used btrfs for a main filesystem on one system, and some external storage. Unlike several years back, I no longer had data corruption issues (I don't know what was going wrong, it's supposed to have data integrity checks and whatever else, but with compressed files every so often I could md5sum the same file and get the wrong response one run, the right one the next. ) But after virtually any unclean shutdown, I'd have it go read only at inopportune moments; the data integrity features would recognize when it hit whatever file that the thing probably powered down mid-write on, then go read only; even if you remounted and just wanted to delete the file, no dice, it'd go read only again; no fsck, and no clear description online on how to recover from that without reading everything off, reformatting, and putting everything back on.

    What I've been using recently, s3qlfs (running on top of ext4). Long story short, on several storage drives (ext4 filesystem) I've made a "s3ql-fs" mount point, "s3ql-data" directory for it to store it's database and up to 10MB data blocks in (it supports cloud storage like S3 and 4 or 5 others, but I'm using it with the local disk storage backend). Put like a 50GB cache on there, away you go. It does deduplication and compression, only uses about 32MB of RAM, burns through a bit of CPU time but for example I have a 4TB USB external currently, with *looks* 4.34TB of stuff on it, using 2.77TB of space. I can run it off my "slowputer" (1ghz core solo) and it'll max out a USB2 disk whether running out of cache or not; on a more modern system, I get like 80MB/sec from the block storage and full disk speed (for spinning rust) out of the cache (or into the cache, the writes go into there too so you don't have any weird write slowdowns from deduplication).

    On my home system I even threw some Virtualbox VMs on there and it works fine, saving all kinds of space.

    Oh, and as a bonus.. the same type of power cuts or USB disk unplugging that hosed btrfs?Since I'm running ext4 as my "real" filesystem, fsck fixes virtually all ills, the base filesystem doesn't lose anything. The s3qlfs on top of it, if a file is cut off mid-write, it can go read-only trying to read it. Unmount s3qlfs, go to s3ql-data and "find -size 0", delete the 0-sized files, run fsck on the filesystem and it'll tell you which files were f'ed up (put them in lost+found too usually), remount filesystem and done.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: btrfs...ugh, oh and i recommend s3qlfs

      Ah yes, the "can't delete when full" and the "deleting doesn't free up any space" scenarios, I've got those scars; as well as the "Monday mornings it will freeze up for three hours doing something very clever" one.

      Lessons learned: unless your job is to sysadmin storage (for instance you work at a cloud provider or academic institution) or you are one of those "feeling lucky, punk?" types, stay well away from anything that's not ext4 or FAT (there may be other similarly tried and proven systems, if so please shout).

      1. Smartypantz

        Re: btrfs...ugh, oh and i recommend s3qlfs

        I completely agree!

        Conservatism in IT is sourly needed. I am NOT joking.!

        Peak IT productivity was probably 10 years ago. The UX designers and cloud evangelists that rules this landscape, at the moment, are heading for dire straits, and the needle descending towards he greatest bubble the world has ever seen, is glinting ever clearer!

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: btrfs...ugh, oh and i recommend s3qlfs

          Well, I wasn't advocating conservatism. More like pragmatism if you like.

          In other words, it is great to have people working on new filesystems and the like, and for people to take them out for a spin. But if you're neither a filesystems developer or your job is to deal with storage or you are an inherently curious person who likes to take risks, you will want to play it safe and install whatever you have been using in the last twenty years.

      2. Tomato42

        Re: btrfs...ugh, oh and i recommend s3qlfs

        xfs was quite predictable for good few years now

  6. UCAP Silver badge

    CentOS is not a Redhat distribution

    Red Hat has three main Linux distributions – Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and CentOS

    Unfortunately this is not completely correct. CentOS is built from Redhat source using a Redgat toolchain (again built from source), but it is not supported by Redhat in any way. In fact the CentOS maintainers have to ensure that all references to Redhat are removed from the documents, user interfaces and package names; they do this because Redhat set the lawyers on them once and threatened to sue them.

    1. Soruk

      Re: CentOS is not a Redhat distribution

      This hasn't been true for a while. https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-and-centos-join-forces

      1. bombastic bob Silver badge
        Meh

        Re: CentOS is not a Redhat distribution

        eh, being "a contributor" isn't quite the same as 'ownership'...

        but knowing there's collaboration is helpful, yes.

    2. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Linux

      Re: CentOS is not a Redhat distribution

      CentOS is like a fork from RH, in that way, so why is your post being downvoted? Isn't the idea of open source and the ability to fork a GOOD thing?

      And RH would be right to insist that their logos and trademarks be removed. So it's all good, right?

    3. diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: CentOS is not a Redhat distribution

      Bear in mind the very next paragraph clarifies the relationship:

      "RHEL is the main commercial release, and CentOS a community-built release based on RHEL, in effect a non-commercial version."

      If you think you've spotted something wrong in an article, don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com and we'll take a look.

      C.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Its great to be back with you again..

    Red Hat.. the distro for the real Linux sys admin enthusiasts..

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Its great to be back with you again..

      Nah, give me anything Debian-based instead!

      Let battle commence!

      (Different AC)

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Its great to be back with you again..

        Shirley you mean Slackware!

        1. seven of five
          Joke

          Re: Its great to be back with you again..

          anything not systemd?

          1. chuckufarley Silver badge
            Joke

            Re: Its great to be back with you again..

            Install Gentoo, fsck bleaches?

        2. Sudosu Bronze badge

          Re: Its great to be back with you again..

          Don't call me Shirley!

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Please mention IMPORTANT features....Pretty Please!

    $ sudo dnf upgrade --refresh

    $ sudo dnf system-upgrade download --refresh --releasever=33

    *

    These magic incantations will take you from Fedora32 (with ext4) to Fedora33 (with ext4)...........Good!

    *

    You only get btrfs with a bare metal install....happy bunnies like me will be doing the magic....and staying with ext4.

    *

    Just saying....and maybe El Reg might have made the point clear.....if you want to stay with ext4, then certain magic incantations will allow you to do so.

    1. AdamWill

      Re: Please mention IMPORTANT features....Pretty Please!

      I mean, that's not a magic incantation. That's just the documented way to run a system upgrade. Of course we aren't going to try and convert your filesystems silently during an upgrade, we're not insane.

      If you're doing a fresh install and you don't want btrfs, just use custom partitioning and pick something else. Still no magic incantations needed...

      1. HPCJohn

        Re: Switching on the "monitor stand"

        Why not? You have to have SOME fun in life.

        Are you feeling lucky, punk? Are you?

      2. chasil

        btrfs-convert

        Many are likely aware of "btrfs-convert - convert from ext2/3/4 or reiserfs filesystem to btrfs in-place."

        I'm assuming that this is possible with the new Fedora release, but there are several important warnings, among them: "The conversion utilizes free space of the original filesystem. The exact estimate of the required space cannot be foretold. The final btrfs metadata might occupy several gigabytes on a hundreds-gigabyte filesystem."

  9. AdamWill

    On btrfs

    Up front: I work for Red Hat on Fedora - I lead the QA team.

    Just wanted to emphasize something on the btrfs front: btrfs being default (for desktop spins, *not* Server especially) for new installs in Fedora 33 does not at all imply this will happen in RHEL. *Some* things that happen in Fedora are definitely driven by RH folks and you can look at them as things that are likely to land in RHEL later if they work out well. But not *everything* that happens in Fedora is like that. As Mike is quoted as saying, the btrfs Change was driven by "the community", i.e. not by anyone at RH in an official capacity. Specifically the main folks behind it are Josef Bacik, Chris Murphy and Neal Gompa - this isn't a secret, the names are right there on https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/BtrfsByDefault - none of whom works for RH. The RHEL storage folks are still focused on the same strategy as they have been for a while.

    Still, the change seems to be working out fine so far. Honestly, better than I expected, I was expecting fireworks. :P

  10. twright

    This specifically references to the fact that the default install used to have separate home and root partitions (for various reasons), leading to a situation where one would become completely full whilst the other had lots of space (filling root with hundreds of gigabytes of containers has come into fashion since this default was set), requiring the user to manually resize partitions to make space. The btrfs default install dispenses with separate partitions and just uses subvolumes instead.

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