Btrfs was supposed to have been the default file system for Fedora 16, but for technical reasons, that did not happen. Word on the street says it will be, in Fedora 17. But you do not have to wait for Fedora 17 to get your system humming on btrfs because you can do it right now.

Linux Mint 10, aka Julia, is the latest release of Linux Mint, the desktop-oriented distribution based on Ubuntu. Like most distributions, Linux Mint has editions, or versions, for several desktop environments. There is, for example, GNOME, KDE, LXDE, Xfce, and Fluxbox editions. The main edition is GNOME-based, and is always the first one to be made available for the public.

For those unfamiliar, Btrfs is a clean break from the approach used in Linux's ext filesystems in years past.

Earlier this month we delivered benchmarks comparing the ZFS, EXT4, and Btrfs file-systems from both solid-state drives and hard drives. In this article we have our Btrfs test results when the zlib compression mount option was enabled for looking at the SSD compression performance.

MeeGo is arguably the dark horse in the mobile platform race: it is new, unfinished, and unavailable on any currently-shipping product, but it is going after the same market as a number of more established platforms. MeeGo is interesting: it is a combined effort by two strong industry players which are trying, in the usual slow manner, to build a truly community-oriented development process.

One of the features though that has just been proposed for Fedora 13 is rather interesting and that is system rollback support via Btrfs file-system snapshots.

This tutorial will explain you how to boot from a BTRFS filesystem with kernel 2.6.31-RC4 and BTRFS 0.19. BTRFS is a new filesystem with some really interesting features like online defragmenting and snapshots. BTRFS is an experimental filesystem, use at your own risk. The kernel used is also experimental.

The past few Linux kernel releases have brought a number of new file-systems to the Linux world. Being the benchmarking junkies that we are, we have set out to compare the file-system performance of EXT4, Btrfs, and NILFS2 under Ubuntu using the Linux 2.6.30 kernel.