Month: September 2021

Enlarge / We don't recommend allowing btrfs to directly manage a complex array of disks—floppy or otherwise. (credit: Faustino Carmona Guerrero via Getty Images)

Btrfs—short for "B-Tree File System" and frequently pronounced "butter" or "butter eff ess"—is the most advanced filesystem present in the mainline Linux kernel. In some ways, btrfs simply seeks to supplant ext4, the default filesystem for most Linux distributions. But btrfs also aims to provide next-gen features that break the simple "filesystem" mold, combining the functionality of a RAID array manager, a volume manager, and more.

We have good news and bad news about this. First, btrfs is a perfectly cromulent single-disk ext4 replacement. But if you're hoping to replace ZFS—or a more complex stack built on discrete RAID management, volume management, and simple filesystem—the picture isn't quite so rosy. Although the btrfs project has fixed many of the glaring problems it launched with in 2009, other problems remain essentially unchanged 12 years later.

History

Chris Mason is the founding developer of btrfs, which he began working on in 2007 while working at Oracle. This leads many people to believe that btrfs is an Oracle project—it is not. The project belonged to Mason, not to his employer, and it remains a community project unencumbered by corporate ownership to this day. In 2009, btrfs 1.0 was accepted into the mainline Linux kernel 2.6.29.

Enlarge / The Inspiration4 mission, inside a Crew Dragon, splashes down on Saturday in the Atlantic Ocean. Interest in such tourist missions is soaring. (credit: SpaceX)

Welcome to Edition 4.17 of the Rocket Report! After the successful conclusion of the Inspiration4 mission this past weekend, we can now look ahead to some significant launches in the days ahead. First up is NASA's Landsat 9 mission on an Atlas V rocket. And in a little less than two weeks, Russia launches a film crew on a Soyuz vehicle to make a movie in space.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Astra licenses rocket engines from Firefly. Astra, the small launch company that recently went public, has signed a roughly $30 million deal for the rights to manufacture Firefly Aerospace's Reaver rocket engines in-house, The Verge reports. Under the deal, which closed earlier this year, Firefly will send up to 50 of its Reaver rocket engines to Astra's rocket factory in Alameda, California, where a development engine was already delivered in late spring for roughly a half-million dollars.