Hot answers tagged btrfs
11
The roadmap for btrfs in Ubuntu is to have it as the default filesystem by 12.04 LTS. The likely cutover to default will be 11.04, other distributions may have more or less aggressive plans, but watching them is your best cue to the perceived stability and reliability and performance of the code.
11
From wiki:
Extent based file storage
2^64 byte == 16 EiB maximum file size
Space-efficient packing of small files
Space-efficient indexed directories
Dynamic inode allocation
Writable snapshots, read-only snapshots
Subvolumes (separate internal filesystem roots)
Checksums on data and metadata
Compression (gzip and LZO)
Integrated multiple device support
...
10
For the benefits: I believe it will be mainly the backup and mirroring features.
But why would you be so hasty as to think of btrfs as a filesystem ready to replace any of your current ones? Both the wiki you refer to :
(...) it is currently possible to corrupt a filesystem irrecoverably if your
machine crashes or loses power on disks that don't handle ...
5
I did a small benchmark. It only tests writes though.
Test data is a Linux kernel source tree (linux-3.8), already unpacked into memory (/dev/shm/ tmpfs), so there should be as little influence as possible from the data source. I used compressible data for this test since compression with non-compressible files is nonsense regardless of encryption.
Using ...
5
The "common wisdom" of filesystem developers is that it takes some 5 years of beating to consider a filesystem stable enough for non-experimental use. BTRFS hasn't accumulated 5 years yet, so it is considered strictly for experimental use right now. If the data on the machine aren't critical, and a rigurous backup scheme is in place, go wild. Be prepared to ...
5
Secure deletion is a tough proposition on any filesystem. Unless the filesystem is very peculiar and guarantees that there aren't other copies of the file lying around, you need to clear all the free space on the device. While you are more likely to find many bits of the file on copy-on-write filesystems, even more “static” filesystems don't have this ...
4
I found out the answer by asking on the mailing-list.
btrfs doesn't do RAID per-volume, but rather on a per-chunk basis. The filesystem reserves "raw" space in (p.e.) 1GB chunks. Initializing the fs with raid1 means that everytime it tries to allocate a chunk, it tries to allocate a copy of this chunk on another device.
This architecture allows mixed-size ...
3
I also advise you to use other tools for benchmarking I/O than dd.
Brtfs is not a traditional filesystem and being a copy-on-write and transactional filesystem, most of the operations are done in memory and not directly on the hdds.
So when you issue the deletes and recreate the file, I believe it will just reuse what is has in memory. Let's not forget that ...
3
Hmmm, btrfs seems to defeat all usual shredding methods...
There is a mount option called nodatacow but that doesn't seem to affect already existing files.
As you already have sensible files on your disk this btrfs FAQ entry won't help you either.
Then there's debugfs. It's only for ext filesystems but there's a patch for it that might work. You could use ...
3
I asked a similar question 2 years ago.
However in my case, I was only planning to copy a single device onto raid0.
I eventually found a solution. At the time you couldn't convert from raid0 to raid10, but it looks like that since kernel 3.3, you can now. So that solution may work for you in the end.
A problem with that approach is that it copies the ...
3
btrfs-gui might be what you're looking for. It doesn't do much yet, last time I tried it. You are much better off with btrfs-progs.
Note that, btrfs has subvolumes, not sub-partitions. Think of them as directories, which you can create, delete, take snapshots of, assign quotas etc.
3
openSUSE 12.1, if installed on btrfs, automatically enables tool called snapper which uses btrfs snapshotting to get snapshots of the system before installing new packages. It is well possible that these snapshots are consuming your disk space. Check out your snapshots with snapper list command.
Check out this blogpost for more information about ...
3
My first guess was btrfs since the I/O processes of this file system sometimes take over. But it wouldn't explain why X locks up.
Looking at the interrupts, I see this:
# cat /proc/interrupts
CPU0 CPU1 CPU2 CPU3 CPU4 CPU5 CPU6 CPU7
0: 179 0 0 0 0 ...
3
I can't give you a final recommendation, but I can share a few thoughts on the subject. Given that /etc is usually rather small, you might just go for a simple compressed tar-ball solution. If you hardly need to go through the history, it might be the easiest solution to set up.
For me it would be to tedious to manage logical volumes just to do keep track ...
3
What do you mean by "home backup scenario"? If you mean system that is backuped regulary and you can afford lost of some work (btrfs is only fs for /home without crutial data) I'd say you can try it if you feel very adventorous.
If you mean fs that underlaying backup you probably need rock-stable filesystem - like ext3/4 with ultra conservative options ...
2
According to Btrfs wiki, read-only snapshots are available since Linux 2.6.38. So make sure you have a recent kernel. Apart from that, you should be just able to do it using ro mount option (mount -o [other-options],ro ...).
2
One possible answer is that the remote filesystem is mounted by default with the "atime" option. Access time writes for everything that the remote rsync accesses combined with the write penalty you suffer with RAID 5 (computing parity means reading all the RAID disks before you write to one of them) could explain the I/O magnification on the remote side.
...
2
Firstly, we'll create the layout we want in the default subvolume:
btrfs subvolume snapshot / /rootfs
mkdir /snapshots
Note that /rootfs will be our new root filesystem, so don't make any changes to the current one after this step.
Edit /rootfs/etc/fstab to make the system use the new rootfs subvolume as root filesystem. For that, you'll need to modify ...
2
This behaviour is because BTRFS supports sparse files. Basically, any sufficiently long string of "empty space" (0 bits) will be stored as metadata saying "from this point to this other point is all 0s" instead of actually writing the 0s to disk. In this case, as your input stream is /dev/zero, your entire file is 0s, and thusly its actual size on disk is ...
2
I'm not sure the disk drives write cache is going to fix the issue for you as it sounds like you are using a loop device. So there is still the page cache/file in between your Btrfs filesystem and the actual disk. The same type of issue exists for journaling filesystems detailed here for loop-AES. So when data is synced to your loop device, it may not be on ...
2
The redistribution of files when removing a device is transparent.
I looked at the source ( a 1 Gb git clone) but I have never been able to find anything in the user-land utilities (now bundled in btrfs IIRC) to do this without actually removing (btrfs device delete) and re-adding (btrfs device add) the device. I specifically looked at mapping subvolumes to ...
1
I agree with vonbrand, btrfs is not yet to the maturity level of ext* or XFS or JFS to name a few. I would not use it on a laptop with precious data unless I have a reliable backup that can be done also on the go.
Btrfs can detect corruptions but it won't do anything more than reporting the detection unless you have an available uncorrupted copy of the same ...
1
The entire filesystem game has changed significantly, from even a few years ago. Pragmatically speaking, most the old recommendations have become irrelevant.
You will need to check/perform more recent benchmarks, but the preferred choices have very much reduced.
For almost every conceivable situation, I would always prefer EXT4. this is only speaking ...
1
Are you using Ubuntu?
Ubuntu ships with an old version of btrfs-tools (aka "btrfs-progs"), and thus the userland tools do not support read-only snapshots.
See this bug (and it's parent bug):
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/btrfs-tools/+bug/924621
1
I think it is supposed to be:
btrfs subvolume snapshot -r live snap
Except it doesn't work for me.
I get that from reading the source code of the btrfs command. However it doesn't seem to work, if you try it, the argument parser gives you an error. I can't see why, and haven't bothered to ask the developers. This is off v0.19 (rev fdb6c0 in their git ...
1
...
# cd /media/root
# mv /root /rootuser
Whoops?! Perhaps you meant to do this, instead:
# mv root rootuser
Assuming no typo in your question, that's probably the reason why you later find /media/root/root already exists. You never moved it out of the way!
1
Try cd'ing out of the emptydir and running lsof +D /path/to/emptydir on it to see what has it open. Depending what the directory is and how its used, perhaps something is opening and closing the directory very fast and you just happen to catch it when it doesn't have anything in it when running ls but does have something when running rm -fr emptydir. It ...
1
I think you can make a snapshot of files/directories in /etc.
First make a list of files /etc/ directory:
# ls -lha /etc >> /snapshotofetc
And if you make a file in the /etc
# touch testfile
and if you retake a snapshot of /etc like what we ve done before
# ls -lhs /etc /lastsnapshotofetc
and then you can compare the differences between the ...
1
This is short but sweet.
Any improvement to the stability and data integrity of the filesystem is beneficial for end users. Computers exist for end users and storing their photos, documents, movies, whatever.
You'll never know the disasters you averted by upgrading to a more robust filesystem.
1
Which distro are you using? BTRFS is still pretty recent, so it helps to have a recent implementation of it.
Could this be a disk problem? Does the disk make any unusual noises? Could it be a computer problem? Does the computer you're using hang at other occations as well? What does dmesg say?
Try using ionice when copying the file over, to lower the io ...
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