People asked me way too often on how to test new BTRFS features – a reason for me to do this article. It’s nothing special, but you have two possibilities to do it:

Possibility number 1:
You pull the patches you want to test from the git repository of Chris Mason and apply those patches one by one against your kernel sources (patch -p1 < patchfile) - the advantage here is that you can apply other patches too, unrelated to BTRFS. Possibility number 2: Git is a wonderful tool and it comes in handy that people use it for kernel development. You can check out sources and merge Chris Masons changes:

git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/mason/linux-btrfs.git linux-btrfs
cd linux-btrfs
git branch --track for-linux origin/for-linus
git checkout for-linus

Now compile the kernel as usual and boot it and pray that things work as expected…