[elrepo] BTRFS for RHEL 8

[Akemi Yagi]

On Tue, Jan 21, 2020 at 2:36 PM Joseph Christopher Sible
<jcsible at cert.org> wrote:
>
> I'm okay with using kernel-ml. However, doesn't that only remove the need for
> kmod-btrfs? Don't I still need btrfs-progs to practically use the filesystem?
>
> Joseph C. Sible

Yes. I can put what was in the testing repo back in there so you can
give it a try.

Akemi

> -----Original Message-----
> From: elrepo-bounces at lists.elrepo.org <elrepo-bounces at lists.elrepo.org> On Behalf Of Akemi Yagi
> Sent: Tuesday, January 21, 2020 5:31 PM
> To: EL Repo General Mailing List <elrepo at lists.elrepo.org>
> Subject: Re: [elrepo] BTRFS for RHEL 8
>
> 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