On the 12th of July Chris Mason mailed to the lkml.org mailinglist introducing his new project, a filesystem for a Datacenter, called BTRFS. Although we are not talking about a final version, the technical specifications are looking great. If you want to have a look at the current status, feel free to check out the downloads. Chris Mason is a member of the Oracle Linux Kernel Team.

Anyways, my Linux desktop here has to suffer for it. Having the Gentoo portage tree on its own partition it is possible to test the new filesystem under real world conditions.

Here are some timings of tests I did:

time emerge –sync:

real 3m49.666s
user 0m21.163s
sys 0m20.111s

Compared to JFS:

time emerge –sync:

real 5m14.770s
user 0m23.996s
sys 0m16.572s