Posts by chuckufarley

Do you want speed or security as expected? Spectre CPU defenses can cripple performance on Linux in tests

The Foundation of Computational Trust...

...Is defined by four words. They are: Security, Transparency, Stability, and Speed. Think of them as Mazlow's Hierarchy of Needs in a digital format. Without Speed there is no reason to uses computers instead of pen and paper. Without Stability there is no way to trust the Speed. Without Transparency there is no way to trust the Stability. Without Security there is no trust at all.

I have spent a very long time thinking about this and I do not post it lightly. Please do not respond lightly.

openSUSE leaps to 15.3 – now built with 'same binary packages' as SUSE Enterprise

Re: way back...

Maybe I have missed something. Maybe I was in a coma and it came and went. Was there really ever a time when Red Hat was the default Linux distro? Haven't there always been at least two very viable alternatives to Red Hat?

Debian, Slackware, Mandrake, Gentoo, SuSE all have long histories and have spawned enough forks to keep forking going.

My point here is that in FLOSS ecosystems the "defaults" are just variables defined by the perceptions of users and developers, and the occasional journalist.

After all, before Linux was my "default" if I wanted FLOSS Unix I went with *BSD. Anybody else have a different default?

Re: Or use debian

You installed a rolling release version meant for development and it fell over while trying to install updates?

I am shocked! Shocked, I tell you!

Just in case anyone else has missed the not-so-fine-print:

Tumbleweed is a rolling release and Leap is a stable release.

I have the USB stick from the DVD...

...and I'll put it to use later today on my home servers. I hope the "package parity" with SLE pays dividends for them.

Many years ago I had installed OpenSUSE in a VM and played around with it. I never really gave it serious consideration for home use because I didn't want to leave Debian and Ubuntu. However Debian because a chore and Ubuntu has left users with no choice but the Snap Store. So earlier this year I switched my servers to OpenSuse and I have to say I am more pleased with it than I thought I would be. Coming from a guy like me, that is high praise.

UK digital secretary Oliver Dowden starts national security probe into proposed Arm-Nvidia merger

I seem to recall...

...in the distant past, that once upon a time Nvidia was the underdog. In this epoch long since past 3DFX with the go to graphics card. At least until they published an open source driver that Nvidia used to steal their patented hardware acceleration technology. Then when 3DFX sued Nvidia for patent infringment, Nvidia committed a very hostile takeover of 3DFX in order to make the case disappear.

I don't blame anyone for not trusting Nvidia. Hell, the really truly paranoid side me thinks that they set up shell companies to buy their products as soon as they launch just to drive up the prices.

Won't somebody please think of the children!!! UK to mount fresh assault on end-to-end encryption in Facebook

It is clear to me...

...that many politicians are being targeted by misinformation campaigns spread by antisocial networking sites. You see, if users can't encrypt their data then they can't hide it from the antisocial networks. Also, if the politicians are trying to regulate encryption they are obviously too busy to regulate corporations and run-away-capitalist-oligarch makers.

Nominet chooses civil war over compromise by rejecting ex-BBC Trust chairman

It's a good thing that...

...The UK isn't in the middle of executing a Brexit plan that is doomed to fail while managing the fallout of a global pandemic. Other wise the government would have it's hands full and wouldn't intervene.

Oh wait...

If you can't log into Azure, Teams or Xbox Live right now: Microsoft cloud services in worldwide outage

25 years after...

...I decided the I would never again willfully deploy a Microsoft branded DNS server this stuff is still happening. Good job Microsoft! You are still such so influential that systemd's resolved is following in your footsteps!

It's one thing to reinvent the wheel but it takes a special kind of idiot to reinvent the cube and call it a wheel.

Microsoft promises end-to-end encrypted Teams calls for some, invites you to go passwordless with Azure AD

Replacing my passwords...

...With bio-metrics just means that the bad actors will need to learn how to spoof bio-metrics. How would this compare to enforcing the managed use of lengthy, randomized that are changed on a regular basis?

One huge benefit of using bio-metrics is that over time it limits the amount of data that needs to be processed in order to authenticate a user. Another is that no one (to my knowledge) has come up with a quick way to spoof bio-metrics...yet. However, our finger prints rarely change. The same is true for our faces. Once a bio-metric measurement has been cracked it should be considered insecure for the foreseeable future. In my opinion if passwords are long enough, random enough, changed often enough, and are securely hashed they will remain superior to bio-metric authentication, but perhaps inferior to using bio-metrics as 2FA with strong passwords.

Instead of trying to chase this Holy Grail I think Microsoft would be better off spending it's money learning how to apply the Shannon Limit to Dev Ops in order to reduce the number of bugs in released code to something close to zero. I think that Grail is more Holy than passwordless authentication..

So, bye-bye mighty nerd haven Fry’s, took Silicon to the Valley... and now you must die

Fry's Failed because...

...The three brothers that founded it came from a family of grocers used to buying at the lowest price and selling for anything higher. A case in point is the mysterious 395 MHz AMD K6-3. This was on sale for one weekend at Fry's Electronics in late 1999. They sold out in hours with a price of just under $60 and yet there were only two motherboards in the world that could support the FSB speeds and clock multipliers needed to equal 390 MHz. They were a faulty lot of AMD K6-3 400 MHz CPU's Fry's bought and sold as to customers that didn't know any better. No one knows how many people never returned to Fry's after their new computer's burnt up three months later.

If you always insist on maximizing profits you are also driving customers away. Always.

Federal Reserve falls over in massive hours-long tech outage, knocks down US inter-bank transfer system

This is just a friendly reminder...

...That it is often a Good Thing to keep a simple script called cya.sh that contains the following line:

hostname && whoami && pwd

I am not saying the lack of such a script has anything to do the outage detailed in this news article. This is just a friendly reminder.

Canonical turns to Google framework for new installer, but community asks why not have a Flutter on GTK?

It won't matter...

...What the community wants. That's what Ubuntu's recent history has taught me. A lot of us were opposed to Snap being the default package manager, but it's what we have. I am going to be off of Ubuntu soon. OpenSUSE is looking very attractive, as is Void.

This space is intentionally left blank

Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'? Newbie gripe sparks some soul-searching among Debian community

Re: I love the way developers...

That's cute and all, but I think you should read a bit more before you type. While you are not typing, study what you read. Get to know us. Did you know that on El Reg you can read the entire post history of a person just by clicking on their user name here in the comments section?

If I didn't like their opinions I would let it slide as long it didn't have a real world impact on the things that I care about. Debian is dear to me and it pains me that the devs continue turning it ever tighter into a death spiral. As the world changes around them they seem intent to carry on fighting a battle that was won years ago. Some of them seem blind to the fact that real battles now and in the near future will be fought in hardware and the casualties triaged and treated in firmware.

In the late 1990's one could install an entirely usable Linux desktop in less than 256MB of disk space. AMD now ships a CPU with that much L3 cache. How much longer until the OS-on-a-chip becomes main stream?

Re: I love the way developers...

Well, if it's semantics you want...

Please do not confuse Convenience with Usability!

If it's Freedom you want...

Please don't tell me shipping crippleware in the guise of Free Software isn't a joke!

Am I confused about why Debian exists? No, I think I have really good grasp of that one. Just because I don't write a novella to justify it doesn't make it so. What I am confused about is how Debian will continue to exist because the world is an ever changing place and they seem stuck in the year 2005. They have good VM support, but running containers is a headache. I cannot for the life of me name a single Cloud Provider that runs Debian on bare metal.

Twenty-five years ago it was revolutionary to "apt-get install apache" and the Debian devs were at the forefront of innovation. Now, a human generation later, they are proud of their crippleware! We are more than 20% on the way through the 21st century. Any software that is not both easily usable and open sourced by this point in time is either an evolutionary dead end or a niche product. Anyone wanna call the Vegas odds makers about Debian's future?

Re: Isn’t that what Debian-based distros like Ubuntu are for?

Ubuntu is not been based on Debian. They out grew it years ago. They may still have programs apt-get but they use their own code base now

Re: I love the way developers...

"No, the entire point is what is intended by..."

In all that follows the ... you did not make single point that countered my statement that software allows you to use your computer. I don't care what kind of program you are righting or which OS you are running it on. Software makes programmable hardware usable. Otherwise all computers would be limited to the instructions that could fit on the chips. It doesn't matter a user with ever directly access the system or not.

Now you are right to say that the Debian devs are not forcing me to use their software. In fact I would go so far so argue that their degree Zealotry is forcing a lot of Infidels like my self away from Debian because we, in our Unholy Filth, wish to actually use our hardware in ways close to the manner intended by the hardware manufacturers.

As unnatural as it may seem to you, not everyone in the world wants to boot to a command line after a fresh install. Nor do most user wish to have a computer that doesn't connect to the internet.

I am not trying to say that Debian doesn't have a place in the Linux ecosystem. I am just saying that every year that place is going to get smaller and smaller until things change because if you have to be a developer to use it then only developers will use it. That makes a good distro to base your distro on, but a lousy distro to use, even as a server. That will not last though because Debian isn't the only distro

with good devs.

OpenSuse, Fedora, Void, Funtoo, and even Gentoo make usability a higher priority than Debian does. And all them typically have much newer packages in their repositories. Think about that for a while and ask yourself where Debian will be 10 or twenty years from now.

Re: I love the way developers...

You say that shipping crippleware in the name of Free Software is not hypocrisy.

I love the way developers...

...get all high and mighty about the principles behind shoving their vision of what Free Software means down our throats. Anyone thinking that the old "Let them Eat Ubuntu" argument holds water hasn't thought it through. Some of these devs are unintentionally becoming worse then Gates or Ballmer because while Windows couldn't work well, Linux can work very well indeed. That's the entire point of any software: To allow you to use your computer. Putting any other so called "Principles" above that seems a very base form of hypocrisy to me. You know those firmware blobs get updates, right? And you know those updates fix bugs and security issues, right? So if the hardware manufacturers wish to protect their IP by hiding behind a binary driver blob I say let them as long the system stays stable and secure.

If the devs don't want to use it that it up to them but they shouldn't expect the average person to feel that way or make them jump through hoops because the entire point of any software is to allow you to use your computer. Usability is the ultimate freedom. Free Software is an empty slogan without usability.

Epic Games files competition lawsuit against Google in the UK over Fortnite's ejection from Play Store

Give unto Alphabet what is Alphabet's...

...and add unto that what ever else Alphabet can grab. Yes, it's an abuse of power and should be fought. No, I don't think Epic has much of a chance by themselves. They need to team up other small players to stand a snowball's chance.

On a side note, I don't really understand why they put all of their eggs in the App Store baskets. They have a popular game that will run on a wide variety of operating systems (except Linux and *BSD) and could make money by releasing it through Steam or GoG or the Humble Store, etc. Maybe they feel they can make more from litigation than from widening their audience.

Loser Trump is no longer useful to Twitter, entire account deleted over fears he'll whip up more mayhem

Never /dev/null...

...because that device file is actually vital to functionality of your system.

While I can see the Sisyphean Justice an every minute cron job something like: "cat Trump >> /dev/null && cp /dev/null /dev/null" I could not in good conscience run such commands on a server, even if I didn't like the owners because they were evil bastards.

Instead I would recommend something like setting /tmp to be cleared on reboot and then run

# mv Trump /tmp/not_tmp_enough

# sync

# rm -rf /tmp/not_tmp_enough

# sync

# fstrim -a -v

# btrfs scrub start /tmp

# shutdown -r now

I would only do this if there were no way to replace the server. Even then I would never trust it again.

United States Congress stormed by violent followers of defeated president, Biden win confirmation halted

Re: What frightens me most...

Ever join an FPS pub server and organize a group of strangers into a cohesive fighting force in less than ten minutes?

Sounding like you are right in important. Getting results is paramount.

Re: Not Unexpected

You are not being cynical enough, my friend. No conspiracy that large could exist because of the secret.

"Two men can keep a secret if one of them is dead."

People can and will and do talk. If the election was really stolen from Trump we would know about by now. It takes less than 6 seconds for email to travel halfway around the planet. If the proof were out there it surely didn't land in everyone's Spam Folder.

When in doubt use Occam's Razor. One of these scenarios is more likely to be true than the other:

A.) A national election was rigged through a broadly backed Conspiracy that crossed Local, State, and Federal jurisdictions and therefore required the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people. And of all of those people not a single one has come forward, been caught in a lie, or made any other form of mistake important enough to give up the game.

B.) When faced with an insurmountable challenge to their world view thousands of US citizens have chosen to (once again) prove that Joseph Goebbels was correct when he said: "People would rather believe an unconvincing lie than an inconvenient truth."

So, ask yourself "Am I a Philosopher (Lover of Wisdom) or am I an Ostrich with it's head in the sand?" It is hard, hard thing to do. Yet it must be done if you really wish to carry on one way or the other. Other wise you are not carrying. You are being carried.

What frightens me most...

...Isn't what has happened today. It's what could happen later if other delusional persons should see this as their "Ruby Ridge Moment." Timothy McVeigh kill 168 people by himself. What could thousands do if they worked together?

Re: I'm surprised

" I'm surprised that anyone has downvoted any of the above comments. "

There are Cowards, there are Damned Cowards, and then there are Trump Fanatics. This is why I think anyone down voting a post on El Reg should be forced to leave a reply or at least named publicly.

Re: Kaiser Chiefs redux?

https://twitter.com/IlhanMN/status/1346934098384793606?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

If only our ponies hadn't bolted. I wonder if Mitch McConnell is wishing he could call a redo for 2019...

Buggy behavior bites .NET SqlClient for unlucky Linux users

This is most likely nonsense so stop...

...Reading now.

.NET is meant to be a replacement for Java which Sun Microsystems meant to be the ultimate middleware platform. This means that Java inherited (and thus .NET) the age old "lost in translation" problem. Has anyone coined a Law about this that I could quote? Not to my knowledge so I'll get on with it...

You cannot optimize middleware for a given OS without causing performance problems and/or security issues on the other OS(s) you are running because, well, they are different. Apples are not Pi's, Windows are not Sun Rooms, GNU is Not UNIX, AMD is not Intel, Sparc is not ARM, etc.

My best guess is that someone somewhere has added optimizations to the .NET/mono code for their given platform and this is what is coming back to byte other users of the middleware. I can understand why they did it. Middleware sucks and they went to school and got a degree in programming and all they were taught was how to write apps in middleware. They were even told that this was good thing. So what harm can come from making a good thing better if the downside only affects people who are using super computers with 1024+ threads?

That kind of usage must be waaaayyy down the line. Like, 2030 at least. We can fix it before then. If we don't get laid off...

So yeah, code review FTW.

Chuck Yeager, sound barrier pioneer pilot, dies at 97

According to his autobigraphy...

...Chuck Yeager's great success as pilot was due in large part to his exceptional eye sight. As a squadron leader in WWII Yeager would be heading south across the Channel and spot the German aircraft, ID their makes and models, and have targets assigned to his squadron members a full minute before anyone else could see them. This is while flying at 300+ MPH toward the enemy and them moving at a similar speed toward him.

They are called The Greatest Generation for many reasons.

Windows on Wheels is back, though the truck has come to a standstill, much like the OS

Maybe the drivers...

...just wanted their own Stop Sign.

OpenZFS v2.0.0 targets Linux and FreeBSD – shame about the Oracle licensing worries

Re: "acting like Sock Puppet"

I will not even down vote you for that.

You can deny reality all you want to. However, the historical evidence is there to support an extreme amount of caution in this case. Until there is a body of historical evidence to the contrary, that is to say showing that Oracle and Larry Ellison have both changed their ways, I will not change my opinion.

Calling myself and others Zealots is easy to do without knowing us, but since this is the internet all you have to do is click my name to read my post history. Which you didn't do because you don't care one way or the the other about this matter. You just care about what you are paid to post. Just like any good Sock Puppet account holder.

So you and the rest of the Sock Puppet Army can:

Kiss

My

Ass.

Re: "acting within the rights granted"

Even as a private citizen I don't use ZFS with Linux because of the licensing conundrum. I can't recommend a business do it. If ZFS ever makes it into the main-line kernel then the weight of the Linux Foundation will be behind it.

Remember, is Oracle we are talking about. They ship their code to customers with features enabled they never paid for and then go back and sue them after they compile it.

AWS reveals it broke itself by exceeding OS thread limits, sysadmins weren’t familiar with some workarounds

Re: Plan One

Are you saying that AWS is a symptom of Humanity's Auto-Immunity Disorder?

I think they are Nerfing...

...the wrong object.

Single Points of Failure are BAD...unless you have Too Many Points of Failure. In that case the KISS dogma will never run over your karma.

As a private citizen that would be extremely put out if the entire world were to catch fire I cannot condone giving more control to a daemon that has fallen over so spectacularly. It's almost as if they fed SystemD'oh! steroids and expected good things to come of it.

Comcast to impose 1.2TB-a-month broadband download limits across more of America from next year

Download caps are fake news...

..because in the New World Order, WFH and Cloud Computing will require more upstream transfers than Comcast's fine printers can afford ink for.

Election security fears doused with reality: Top officials say Nov 3 'was the most secure in American history.' The end

Re: It wasn't the truth you were after...

...Why bother looking at all? You could just make up your own lies without having to listen to other people's.

If it is the truth you are after and if you know a single damn thing about database management then you know about place holder values. They can be used for things like DoB in election systems. How many "dead" voters are alive and well (for example) because a county clerk in BFE, Arkansas has too much to do and can't call Joe Bob Robbins 5 times a day to get him to come down and correct the omission in their data? And what dates do they use so they *know* this isn't the right DoB? The most common ones in the US are 01/01/1900, 01/01/1901, and 01/01/1850. In that order. This happens a lot more than you know, because you are still talking about dead people voting.

Do your own damned homework! Cure your own ignorance! I cannot do it for you because you will not accept what people like me tell you because you already know everything. If you know everything already then you can't learn anything. That has to be the saddest state any human can be in.

When it is all said and done...

...with every legal vote counted and the elections certified, we might find that just enough Republicans voted for Biden to push him over the top. I personally know of at least one that voted for him. I wonder how many more did? It must be hard not being able to talk about doing it if your friends and family are all Trump supporters.

Who among you can resist an eight-core, 2.9GHz mini-PC or thin client that drives four displays?

I really hate to say this...

...But based on what I have seen lately from AMD "embedded" products almost none of these will wind up in a consumer channel. For example, take the Epyc 3000 line of CPU's. I can buy an Epyc 3201 or Epyc 3251 based board. That's is it. There is nothing else in the channels that will make it to consumers.

According to a friend of mine that has some knowledge of the situation the development costs are higher on this sort of product because of the high cost per CPU even when going well beyond AMD's "minimum buy-in." They tell me it is still cheaper to wait in line for Intel chips. This means that unless an OEM can commit to a huge number of shipments (like Supermicro or ASROCK) any efforts will focus on specialty work where the customers insist on not using Intel parts. I have no way to verify that, but I also have no reason to doubt my friend.

Alphabet thanks ads and AI for its $124m-a-day quarterly profit, and comes out swinging against antitrust action

Because it's convenient?

Maybe if a person doesn't mind being treated like an all you can gorge data buffet. Otherwise it's not convenient at all. Have you ever installed a fresh OS in a VM and run Google searches without logging into Google? It sucks. Try it sometime. You get one (good) set of results if Google knows it's you but you get another (garbage) set of results if you try to use it anonymously.

I don't care how they spin it. Alphabet's and Google's actions have passed several points of no return with me. I hope the whole slimy conglomerate gets nationalized and handed over to the UN as a technology and services trust. Then the UN would be a lot closer to sustaining it's self.

China sets itself 2035 goal for technology self-sufficiency and covets title as the world’s top innovator

I think they can do it...

...because they have a population of about two billion people. If just one out every thousand Chinese citizens has the education and talent needed to move their goals along that gives them about 2,000,000 innovators.

Google Safari Workaround case inspires campaign to sue Facebook in UK's High Court over Cambridge Analytica app

Well it's a good thing...

...Zuck didn't give the finger to the UK's government by refusing to appear before Parliament to answer questions about this whole affair.

Oh, wait. It turns out that is exactly what he did. It looks like he set fire to the bridge while it was still being built.

Facebook tells academics to stop monitoring its political ads for any rule-breaking.... on privacy grounds

Re: For the third time...You can only choose one:

Oh, my child! Not choosing a choice in and of itself.

For the third time...You can only choose one:

A.) Facebook

B.) Truth and Justice for All

Need a new computer for homeschooling? You can do worse than a sub-£30 2007 MacBook off eBay

Well, it ain't no MacBook...

...But my 32-bit HP Pavilion laptop with an AMD A6-6310 runs all manner of distros rather well, if I don't want to do more than browser the web and watch movies. And as long as I don't run a bloated desktop environment but Mate or XFCE4 with lightdm is very usable. I'm a little worried about it's future because if Firefox and Chrome get too much bigger I might have to switch to minimal DE like Enlightenment.

China watches 170,000 years’ worth of short videos every day

On the other hand...

...if you look at the stats for IBM's World Community grid, Team China donates about 10 years of CPU time a day:

https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/team/viewTeamStatHistory.do?teamId=916RWX2QBN1&numRecordsPerPage=365

And they have contributed over 24,000 years of CPU time total:

https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/stat/viewStatsByTeamAT.do?sort=cpu

This is by far the most daily CPU time of any national team but it doesn't compare to 140,000 years of video a day!

Intel celebrates security of Ice Lake Xeon processors, so far impervious to any threat due to their unavailability

I like the ideas...

...Behind encrypted RAM and all that. I will admit that I am skeptical (and maybe even more cynical, if possible) about Intel's claims. It's not just Intel either. I think I am developing a full blown case of hardware vulnerability paranoia.

This is due to the fact that as time goes by it is inevitable that more of what we used to do in software will be done in hardware. I spent decades watching people roll their eyes when I told them that reducing their software footprint was the fastest and cheapest way to reduce the attack surface of their organization. Maybe, just maybe, had they actually been paying me for advice instead of just "Making IT Work" they would have listened. After I have been gone from those companies for decades I look back and in my minds eye I can those eyes rolling again when some PFY says "You are going to ransom? You know that will only make things worse, right?"

My point is that I want to be able to choose which features I get in my CPU now. For 25 years I have able to apt-get my way to a (mostly?) stable and secure system. Now it's time for some new commands, like "Intel-put --cores=32 --L2=2M --L3=128M --AVX=128 --hidden-backdoors=-1" and have them spit out my desired hardware. It would not be cheap but it would go a long way towards rebuilding the trust that was lost.

Maybe, just maybe, in the future everyone will be able to design a custom CPU in fifteen minutes.

Third time's still the charm: AMD touts Zen-3-based Ryzen 5000 line, says it will 'deliver absolute leadership in x86'

Re: Hold up..

...because I think there is another scenario to consider.

As the designs of the CPU's becomes better they become more efficient at processing. With the double digit gains in IPC there may come a day when reducing the number cores is a good idea for main steam computing chips. This is because with a high enough IPC CPU manufactures are better off selling a four core CPU with 4x SMT than they are selling an eight core CPU with 2x SMT. A case in point (Although at the Enterprise level) is IBM's Power 10 CPU with it's 8x SMT. Once AMD and Intel get their designs dialed in we could see dual core laptops supporting 16 threads.

Remember that here in The Land Beyond Moore's Law we will see improvements to designs more often because it's is easier to do than shrinking a die. Am I right, Intel?

I wonder if...

...The manufacturing yields will take a hit do to the new chiplet design? Most applications will not even notice but a few will. I have to use containers to isolate some work loads on Zen2 CPU's because they loose about 10% of overall performance if the process has to reach across the Infinity Fabric too often to get it's data. By ensuring that the tasks stay pinned to specific sets of cores I can crunch more numbers but with a higher management overhead.

Not that I am going to recommend too many people currently on Zen2 run out and invest heavily in Zen3 just because of this. On the other hand, if you have been putting off upgrading for a while then this might just be your new kit.

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

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

Install Gentoo, fsck bleaches?

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.

Re: Btrfs

Spoken like some someone that has never used it.