The developers of the AlmaLinux project, which develops an edition of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution kit, announced the addition of support for the Btrfs file system and the ability to partition drives using Btrfs in the installer. The reason cited is progress in Btrfs development and advanced features such as checksums for detecting data and metadata corruption, snapshots, convenient volume management, transparent compression and support for the reflink operation for creating a copy of files through metadata cloning.
You can test Btrfs support in beta versions of AlmaLinux OS 10.1 or in builds of the AlmaLinux OS Kitten distribution, based on CentOS Stream 10.
The work to return Btrfs support was carried out jointly with developers from the Fedora and CentOS projects included in the working groups Fedora Btrfs SIG and CentOS Hyperscale SIG.
Red Hat declared Btrfs obsolete in the release of RHEL 7.4 (2017) and completely stopped supporting it in the RHEL 8 branch (2019), by removing the btrfs.ko kernel module, btrfs-progs utilities and the snapper package from the base distribution. At the same time, support for the Btrfs file system was continued in Oracle Linux.
In addition to adding Btrfs to the installer, installing the kernel module and returning the btrfs-progs set of utilities, AlmaLinux also carried out work to adapt the storage management stack to work with Btrfs and checked the correct functioning of the packages bcc, buildah, cockpit, ignition, libblockdev, libguestfs, osbuild, osbuild-composer, podman, pykickstart, python-blivet, skopeo, udisks2 and virt-v2v in environments with Btrfs.