BTRFS: The Linux B-Tree Filesystem

Abstract

BTRFS is a Linux filesystem that has been adopted as the default filesystem in some popular versions of Linux. It is based on copy-on-write, allowing for efficient snapshots and clones. It uses B-trees as its main on-disk data structure. The design goal is to work well for many use cases and workloads. To this end, much effort has been directed to maintaining even performance as the filesystem ages, rather than trying to support a particular narrow benchmark use-case.

Linux filesystems are installed on smartphones as well as enterprise servers. This entails challenges on many different fronts.

---Scalability. The filesystem must scale in many dimensions: disk space, memory, and CPUs.

---Data integrity. Losing data is not an option, and much effort is expended to safeguard the content. This includes checksums, metadata duplication, and RAID support built into the filesystem.

---Disk diversity. The system should work well with SSDs and hard disks. It is also expected to be able to use an array of different sized disks, which poses challenges to the RAID and striping mechanisms.

This article describes the core ideas, data structures, and algorithms of this filesystem. It sheds light on the challenges posed by defragmentation in the presence of snapshots, and the tradeoffs required to maintain even performance in the face of a wide spectrum of workloads.

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Index Terms

• General and reference

  • Cross-computing tools and techniques

    • Performance

• Information systems

  • Information storage systems

    • Storage management

• Software and its engineering

  • Software organization and properties

    • Contextual software domains

      • Operating systems

        • File systems management

        • Memory management

    • Extra-functional properties

      • Software performance