Building a NAS, part 3: filesystem doubts

I had planned to demonstrate the creation and administration of a raid1 BTRFS filesystem in this post, but while playing around with BTRFS I ran into a few snags:

• I was able to mount a normal BTRFS filesystem spanning two devices, but not one in raid1 mode. Then I discovered that I could only mount a raid1 BTRFS filesystem if I gave it a label.
  
• I saw some unexplained mount failures on a multi-device FS which disappeared after I mounted once via another device.
  
• Though data is checksummed, I couldn't find a way to detect checksum failures other than reading all files and watching output from the kernel with dmesg.
  
• I confirmed that in a raid1 setup, BTRFS will still find the good copy after the data on one device is corrupted. However, I couldn't find a way to reliably repair the corruption other than reading and rewriting all files.
  

These issues didn't exactly give me confidence in the maturity of BTRFS. I knew it wasn't production ready, but I hoped it was close. I'm now pretty sure that it is not.

Perhaps more importantly, I also realized that BTRFS is the GPL-licensed answer to the more mature ZFS. ZFS is a Solaris filesystem developed by Sun. It can't be ported to run in the linux kernel because of licensing issues, hence the need for BTRFS. However, BTRFS is mainly sponsored by Oracle, and Oracle is buying Sun. If Oracle's motivation to sponsor BTRFS was to counter Sun's open source efforts, then the Sun deal takes away that motivation. On the other hand, if their motivation was truly to get a next-generation filesystem in linux, then they might as well relicense ZFS under the GPL. Chris Mason gave this vague comment when asked about ZFS and the Sun deal:

Chris: Sun has many interesting projects, and I’m looking forward to working with their R&D teams. We’re committed to continuing Btrfs development, and ZFS doesn’t change our long term plans in that area.

That's no rational explanation why Oracle would continue to support both projects, so I'm skeptical.

Meanwhile, that leaves my little build-a-NAS project stalled. I see these options:

• use BTRFS anyway, even though it's not yet mature and its future seems unsure
• run OpenSolaris and ZFS
• run the FUSE port of ZFS on linux, which dodges the licensing issue by running the FS in userspace (presumably at the cost of performance)
• use software raid + LVM on linux

I'm not sure at all which direction to take.