Some improvements are pretty major, IMHO. The distribution of traffic load between CPUs, KDB integration and the improvements done to perf are my favorites for this release.
And, as a BtrFS user, I am always looking forward to improvements. After accidentally deleting 70+gigs of stuff out of an ext4 partition, I became very fond of snapshots and I can't imagine how I ever lived before that.
Have you had any problems with BtrFS? I'm going to transition my workstation to the just-released OpenSUSE 11.3 in a week or so, and planning to do a fresh install rather than upgrade, so I'm wondering whether to go with ext4 or BtrFS. (my 11.2 install originally was 11.1 and has accumulated a lot of cruft)
I've been running it for two months and haven't had a single Oops yet. That said, it is an experimental filesystem and you should be prepared to restore everything from (non-btrfs) backup.
The btrfs code in 2.6.35 finally fixes something that's annoyed me for years about ext3/4 -- fsync heavy programs blocking everybody else's IO. Vmware workstation used to be insufferable because it and firefox would get into pissing matches over who could use fsync more and my system would grind to a halt. Writeback mode helped a little, but btrfs seems to fix it for good. Yay, btrfs!
Running 2.6.32... I've noticed occasional (maybe every few weeks?) stalls where things become largely unresponsive for a few seconds with a btrfs thread at 100% CPU. Not sure if this is related to my SSD or not; I thought I got one without the stalls (Indilinx Barefoot controller), but it's still a fairly early one so maybe it has some issues that confuse btrfs into busy-waiting or something...
I boot off ext4 and have my home on a BtrFS partition. My kernel is 2.6.32-24 and can't remove snapshots. I am waiting for the next Ubuntu release so I can properly remove them.
The machine is configured to take a snapshot of my home folder on boot, but I am staring to regret snapshotting the downloads folder. I will change the setup accordingly in the future. I would like to mimic the way OpenSolaris does it, but didn't have the time to dig into the docs. Or a live OSOL box.
I haven't had any real problem beyond the annoyance of being unable to remove snapshots (have to rm-rf their guts and move them to a "delete-me later" folder), but, as always, YMMV.
Thanks for the tips; OpenSUSE 11.3 runs on 2.6.34, which as far as I can tell has the snapshot deletion built in, but I'd better test it before I rely on it.
Re booting: I've already got a boot partition as my root is a logical volume on top of a RAID5 array anyway (thinking about changing this though - probably better to buy 2 new much bigger HDDs and RAID1 them instead).
It looks pretty much abandoned at this point; there's been no patches there since May, and nothing other than cross-tree cleanups for much longer than that.
And, as a BtrFS user, I am always looking forward to improvements. After accidentally deleting 70+gigs of stuff out of an ext4 partition, I became very fond of snapshots and I can't imagine how I ever lived before that.