07 June 2012, 14:53

Btrfs inventor Chris Mason leaves Oracle

Chris Mason, the principal author of the Btrfs filesystem, has left Oracle for solid-state enterprise-level storage specialists Fusion-io. While at Fusion-io, which also employs Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak as its chief scientist, Mason says he will continue maintaining and developing the advanced Linux filesystem.

Btrfs, which is widely considered the "ZFS for Linux", will most likely be the next generation of filesystem replacing the current ext4 filesystem. Btrfs is a 64-bit filesystem with advanced features such as snapshotting, copy on write, and checksums to verify stored data and metadata. Oracle now supports Btrfs in its Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK), OpenSUSE has supported Btrfs since version 12.1 of the distribution, and Fedora is planning to integrate it as a bootable option in its next release. According to Mason, "Oracle will still use Btrfs in their Oracle Linux products" and he will still "work with all of the distros using Btrfs in production."

Mason is not the first person to leave Oracle for Fusion-io. Jens Axboe, another Linux storage specialist, left Oracle in 2010 to join the storage company.

(fab)

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