[elrepo] BTRFS for RHEL 8

[Akemi Yagi]

On Tue, Jan 21, 2020 at 1:13 PM Joseph Christopher Sible
<jcsible at cert.org> wrote:
>
> Red Hat removed all traces of BTRFS from RHEL 8. However, I did some searching online and found
> evidence that ELRepo has packages that bring it back. https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/545089 and
> https://centosfaq.org/centos/missing-packages-in-centos8-mirrors-or-do-i-miss-something/#comment-128436
> both seem to say that kmod-btrfs and btrfs-progs are available in ELRepo 8 Testing. However, I don't
> see them there. What am I missing? Where are they?
>
> Joseph C. Sible

There was a request to provide btrfs kmod some months ago. We built
all required packages (including kmod-xxhash, kmod-zstd, libzstd,
kmod-btrfs and btrfs-progs) and put them in the testing repo.

They were tested by the requester but it did not work. There were some
technical issues as well.

There are good reasons why RH abandoned btrfs:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14907771

The btrfs-related code in EL 8 is "frozen" (as of kernel 4.18?)
because btrfs is disabled. Providing a kmod package based on this code
is far from ideal. Backporting the code from a newer kernel and
maintaining it is way beyond the task we can achieve.

We felt that we should not go forward, especially with something as
critical as a file system.

An alternative way to get btrfs is to use kernel-ml. But again, we
only recommend using our kernels for testing purposes.

Akemi