UDS is over! And in the customary wrap-up I stood up and told the audience what the Foundations team have been discussing all week. One of the items is almost certainly going to get a little bit of publicity.

We are going to be doing the work to have btrfs as an installation option, and we have not ruled out making it the default.

I do stress the emphasis of that statement, a number of things would have to be true for us to take that decision:

1. btrfs would need to not be marked “experimental” in the kernel config; we understand that this is planned for 2.6.35, which is the kernel version we are expecting to ship in Maverick.
2. btrfs is not currently supported by GRUB2 (our boot loader) or the installer; these pieces would need to be finished before Feature Freeze.
3. If that happens, we may make it the default for Alpha releases to gain testing; that testing must go smoothly.
4. The btrfs upstream must be happy with the idea.
5. We must be happy with the idea.

It’s a tough gauntlet, and it would only made with the knowledge that production servers and desktops can be run on Lucid as a fully supported version of Ubuntu at the same time.  I’d give it a 1-in-5 chance.