Fedora 45 Looks To Finally Offer Install Support For Stratis Storage

Ever since RHEL deprecated their short-lived Btrfs plans, Red Hat engineers over the past decade have been developing Stratis Storage as their storage management solution leveraging XFS, LUKS, DM, and their Rust-based daemon. While Stratis Storage has been available in Fedora Linux going all the way back to Fedora 28, until now there hasn't been the option of using it for the root file-system on new Fedora installations. Finally with Fedora 45 that may change.

A change proposal has been filed for adding Stratis Storage support to the Anaconda installer in Fedora 45. This support would allow automated installs or manual partitioning from the Anaconda WebUI for setting up Stratis Storage as the root file-system. The change proposal submitted by Red Hat engineer Vojtech Trefny would make Stratis a bootable, installer-supported solution for Fedora.

The change proposal is summed up as:

"This change will make Stratis a bootable, installer-supported solution for Fedora. While Stratis has been available in Fedora for several years, this change integrates native Kickstart support to allow users to configure Stratis as their default, end-to-end storage management implementation for both the primary root (/) filesystem and supplementary filesystems.
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Stratis provides modern storage features such as thin provisioning, snapshots, cache tiers, and encryption, through a single, unified management layer. Achieving a comparable feature set requires manually layering multiple technologies, each with its own tooling and configuration. Stratis simplifies this into a single tool.

While Stratis has been available in Fedora since Fedora 28, the lack of installer support has been a significant barrier to adoption: users could not use Stratis for their root filesystem without resorting to manual, unsupported workarounds. This change removes this barrier making Stratis a first-class installation option alongside Btrfs and LVM."

This proposal still needs to be voted on by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo), but if all goes well with Fedora 45 later this year we could finally see Stratis Storage based installs of Fedora Linux become a reality with the Fedora 45 release. Will be interesting to ultimately see its adoption and how it stands up against Btrfs with Fedora Workstation.