Btrfs might not be dead, but Red Hat officially broke up with the Oracle-created file system. It now joins others on the Deprecated Functionality List. In the 7.4 RHEL release, this also include FedFS. Both of these file systems are still available to other Linux projects, but losing Red Hat support I’m sure isn’t welcome news to either.
El Reg points out that Google expressed the paradoxical view to Btrfs maintainers that the file system was under review for adoption by Android as of June 2017, but that lack of file-level encryption effectively kills the idea. The fact that Google couldn’t determine if the feature was even being worked on isn’t exactly a good sign.
It’s still surprising that Android hasn’t officially standardized on one file system. I think the de facto standard is ext4, but Samsung and a few other OEMs aren’t shy about using their F2FS.
The history of file systems shows the good design and smart implementation are often not as important as timing. Btrfs seems to have run out of time with Red Hat.
Simon Sharwood at The Register comments:
Red Hat has banished the Btrfs, the Oracle-created file system intended to help harden Linux’s storage capabilities.
Read more at: Red Hat banishes Btrfs from RHEL
