How to get rid of the “scanning for btrfs file systems” at start-up?

Question

After upgrading from Ubuntu 12.04 to Ubuntu 12.10, I get a message "scanning for btrfs file systems" at starting-up. I don't have any BTRFS filesystem. It delays the booting for about 15 seconds.

How can I get rid of this?

Answer 1

On Ubuntu 18.04 you can uninstall btrfs-support with

apt purge btrfs-progs

But that probably wouldn't save you much boot time. On my system the reason was, that I don't have a swap partition but on boot it is searched for such for about 30 seconds (while displaying the btrfs-scan).

remove the swap check

• open /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume
• replace RESUME=UUID=xxx with RESUME=none
• issue sudo update-initramfs -u
• reboot your system

(create the file if it does not exist and just add RESUME=none in it)

source: https://askubuntu.com/a/1034952/34298

Answer 2

The btrfs-tools package adds an action to the initramfs to load the btrfs module. If you purge that package (sudo apt-get purge btrfs-tools), followed by an update-initramfs -ukall if the uninstallation doesn't do it already, that should go away (though I've not tested it). If it doesn't, you can always blacklist the brtfs module in /etc/modprobe.d.

Answer 3

Btrfs isn’t too much stable to be used as deafult file-system. Most Linux distributions, probable all, are still using ext4 as primary file-system. So, you can completely remove it from your computer. Try the given command:

sudo apt-get purge btrfs-tools

This command will remove btrfs-tools from your computer. You may need to wait some minutes to complete the process. Your initramfs should be updated automatically but if not happen, do it by this command:

sudo update-initramfs -ukall

Then make a grub update:

sudo update-grub

All is well. Now make a restart. Hope your Ubuntu will start successfully this time.

Reference: http://www.ugcoder.com/disable-scanning-for-btrfs-file-systems-in-ubuntu/

Let me know if you have some questions still.

Answer 4

I saw this as well on 18.04 during boot. Since

/usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/local-premount/btrfs

calls for the scan, you can workaround this issue by dealing with that file. Since I wasn't using btrfs regularly, I purged the file through

sudo apt purge btrfs-progs

Answer 5

Circa 2021

At least with server versions of ubuntu btrfs-tools is not loaded by default and thus this unwanted scan is not an issue. The issue arises when you install a distro that has tools which have btrfs-tools as a dependency like the popular timeshift which is included with mint. That creates the issue. If you can live without timeshift then just remove btrfs-tools per other posts and you should be good to go (it will remove timeshift and update initramfs automatically).

BUT if you are like me use qt-fsarchiver or need timeshift then you can't just remove btrfs-tools as it is a dependency of both. If you remove it you will remove them. :(.

So this is what I did.

sudo modprobe -r btrfs
echo blacklist btrfs | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-btrfs.conf
sudo update-initramfs -u

now reboot and watch to see if the btrfs scan was disabled.

Answer 6

It is the btrfs kernel module that does the scanning (for filesystems scanning multiple devices).

I have not found an indication that this is configurable, so your only options seems to be removing that module from your kernel (modprobe -r btrfs) assuming your kernel supports that.

Answer 7

The script which starts the search looks for the existence of btrfs. Simply renaming the executable /sbin/btrfs to p.e /sbin/btrfs.save (as sudo) will eliminate the search , gaining some 10-20 seconds in the boot-process!