Main Track (K-building)
The Filesystem Diaries: Scaling Btrfs in an Enterprise
<p>Btrfs was merged into the Linux kernel in 2009, arriving with bold promises—and, let's be honest, a reputation for instability. I first tried it on my laptop in 2011. It wiped my data. Twice. On the bright side, it taught me the value of backups.</p>
<p>Fast forward to 2025: btrfs is no longer the experimental filesystem of the past. It's stable, mature, feature-rich, and fully part of the Linux kernel. But old reputations die hard. Even today, Google Cloud Platform doesn’t officially support it—not because of technical shortcomings, but because customer demand hasn’t pushed the issue.</p>
<p>At Chronosphere, we decided to take a fresh look. After months of evaluation and testing, we migrated petabytes of customer data across thousands of disks to btrfs. This talk is our story: why we made the leap, what we learned along the way, and how we’re helping bring btrfs into wider enterprise adoption—including working with Google to support it natively.</p>
<p>I'll share the decision-making process, key performance and reliability insights, and the quirks you only discover when running btrfs at scale. Whether you're btrfs-curious or just love a good ops tale, you'll walk away with real-world takeaways—and maybe a newfound respect for this once-maligned filesystem.</p>
<p>If you know what NTFS, ext4, or ZFS are, you’re ready for this journey.</p>
Weitere Infos
| Live Stream | https://live.fosdem.org/watch/k1105 |
|---|---|
| Format | maintrack |
| Sprache | Englisch |
Weitere Sessions
| 31.01.26 |
<p>Linux desktop is moving to a new era, ditching complex software spaghetti with years of tech debt with… a protocol? That's it? And you expect some compositor projects replace the almighty X server? Replace just the X server? When the protocol's the limit, we can do far more and far more fun stuff!</p> <p>We'll explore some more-or-less obscure uses for Wayland compositors and an embedded case study how simple task of porting DOOM to a router ended up with making it run basically all modern ...
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| 31.01.26 |
<p>In 2026 the KDE project will turn 30, an extraordinary milestone in such a fast-paced ecosystem. </p> <p>In this talk, we'll explore the challenges we have faced over the years and how the KDE community has adapted to stay relevant, continuing to deliver a good experience for people to use on their computers ranging across laptops, mobiles and even gaming consoles.</p> <p>After glancing through our historical context, we'll discuss what's in store for KDE today and how we’re preparing for a ...
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| 31.01.26 |
<p>Personal or professional - Linux on the desktop matters! It’s the daily interface between users and digital sovereignty – and it’s often put last. While Linux rules the cloud, servers, and mobile devices, the desktop is where control, compliance, and independence become tangible. This talk explores the current state of Linux on the desktop in Europe, with a focus on two real-world case studies from a leading automotive company and the German government. We’ll examine success stories, ...
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| 31.01.26 |
<h1>Windows 10 is now end of life!</h1> <h2>... but not dead. Yet.</h2> <h4>The prospect of that alone should be enough to motivate change to Linux desktops - but various governments are providing a lot more reasons to move, such as...</h4> <ul> <li>tariffs (on goods and possibly services)</li> <li>unreliability (in trade and defence partnerships)</li> <li>increased need for data sovereignty ....to name a few.</li> </ul> <p>I've been part of migration projects most of my career, so in this talk ...
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| 31.01.26 |
<p>Why Office is not as easy as you might hope. Come and hear about office algorithms & data structures, as well as the interesting engineering challenges of interoperability from the Libre / Collabora Office experience.</p> <p>Hear how many decades of accumulated backwards compatibility can make life particularly interesting. See why the temptation to start a new office suite from scratch overwhelms many people from time to time, and get some insights into the compromises that brings.</p> ...
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| 31.01.26 |
<p>Libreboot is a coreboot distribution — just as Debian is a Linux distribution — providing fully free (libre) boot firmware for x86 and ARM systems. It replaces proprietary BIOS/UEFI firmware, initializing hardware and starting your operating system. Linux and BSD operating systems are well supported.</p> <p>Coreboot provides essential hardware initialization and then jumps to a payload program that boots your OS. Libreboot provides several payloads including, but not limited to, U-Boot, ...
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| 31.01.26 |
<p>At Wikimedia Foundation, we run Wikipedia, the world's favourite encyclopædia and one of the top ten websites of the Internet! No unicorns, just hardware, open source, and a small engineering org.</p> <p>This talk pulls back the curtain on the stack that keeps Wikipedia fast, reliable, and resilient at global scale. Caching layers, databases, microservices, and Kubernetes are all stitched together to serve the world.</p> <p>We'll also touch on how we've brought our 25-year-old monolith into ...
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