RAID 5/6 Support Finally Comes To Btrfs

Written by Michael Larabel in Free Software on 4 February 2013 at 05:44 PM EST. 15 Comments
FREE SOFTWARE
It's been a long time coming, but the Btrfs file-system now finally supports RAID 5 and RAID 6 configurations for the next-generation Linux file-system.

RAID 5 is block-level striping with distributed parity while RAID 6 is block-level striping with double distributed parity. RAID 5/6 support has been talked about for Btrfs for a long-time while this weekend the experimental patches were finally pushed by Chris Mason.

Still to be worked out is a few bugs plus support for scrub repairing bad blocks, discard support, progs support for parity rebuild, and planned support for n-way mirroring.

Many more details on the implementation and other information regarding Btrfs RAID 5/6 can be found from the mailing list announcement. While currently an experimental feature, the support will likely end up in a mainline Linux kernel release in one or two cycles ahead.
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