Mageia is a new Linux distribution forked from Mandriva. The first release was just last month and it has since been reviewed on this website. (See Mageia 1 review.) Btrfs is a relatively new file system in the Linux kernel, It is a copy-on-write file system with built-in support for, amongst other features, subvolumes (the same functionality provided by LVM, the Linux Logical volume Manager), filesystem-based RAID 0, 1 and 10, online resizing and several other enterprise-grade features.

It is still under heavy development, and not yet recommended for use in a production environment. The man page for btrfs utilities specifically warns that it “… is currently under heavy development, and not suitable for uses other than for benchmarking and review.” It is, however, the default file system on MeeGo, and is slated to be the default on Fedora 16. What that points to is it will also be the default on other Linux distributions before very long. This then is a good time, if your favorite distribution supports it, to start getting used to it.