One of the benefits of Btrfs besides offering competitive performance against other Linux file-systems and SSD optimizations is its support for sub-volumes and writable snapshots. While Btrfs is still in development and is not yet used as a default file-system by any Linux distribution, Red Hat has been introducing support for system rollbacks into Fedora.

Fedora 16 is more than two months away from final, stable release, but pre-Alpha installation ISO images have been floating around. News from the Fedora camp have already indicated that btrfs will be the default file system on Fedora 16, joining the ranks of MeeGo, the first (Linux) distribution to use btrfs as the default file system.

Linux Mint 10 is the first version of Linux Mint with built-in support for the B-tree File System (btrfs). Btrfs is one of the newest file systems in the Linux kernel.

Fedora 15, the latest stable release of the Red Hat-sponsored Linux distribution, is the first Fedora release to have btrfs as a file system option during the installation process. On earlier versions, you would have had to pass the btrfs option to Anaconda at boot time to install Fedora on a btrfs file system.

This guide shows how to work with the btrfs file system on Linux. It covers creating and mounting btrfs file systems, resizing btrfs file systems online, adding and removing devices, changing RAID levels, creating subvolumes and snapshots, using compression and other things.

Like Fedora 13, Fedora 14, the latest version of Fedora, has support for btrfs. However, it is not enabled out of the box, that is, it is not available as a File System Type option, if you did not edit the boot method to include btrfs. This post offers a very simple guide on how to pass the btrfs option to Fedora 14.

Btrfs was supposed to have been the default file system for Fedora 16, but for technical reasons, that did not happen. Word on the street says it will be, in Fedora 17. But you do not have to wait for Fedora 17 to get your system humming on btrfs because you can do it right now.

The next release of the Red Hat sponsored Fedora Linux distribution is going to be Fedora 13, which is due out in 2010 and already promises many new features like Btrfs file-system rollbacks and NFSv4.

This tutorial explains how you can revert failed apt operations (like apt-get upgrade) and roll back to the previous system state with apt-btrfs-snapshot on an Ubuntu 12.10 system that uses the btrfs file system. apt-btrfs-snapshot creates a snapshot of the system before the apt operation.