Getting In The Zone: btrfs on SMR HDDs and NVMe ZNS SSDs
Channel: Fedora Project
Date: 2021-09-30

With the release of kernel 5.12, btrfs gained basic native support for host managed Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) HDDs. This initial support allows formatting and mounting an SMR HDD using btrfs (simple profile), therefore enabling high capacity storage at a lower cost while hiding the sequential write constraint of these devices. Work is also on-going to add support for high performance NVMe Zoned Namespace (ZNS) SSDs.


This talk summarizes btrfs zoned storage support status and discuss future improvement plans. In particular, it presents ideas for a de-clustered erasure coded volumes which will allow resolving the long standing btrfs RAID5/6 problems while enabling RAID (and erasure coded) volumes using zoned storage devices.


Speakers: Damien Le Moal & Johannes Thumshirn