[arch-general] BTRFS, a good choice for /?
Hi, After true multilib support came for arch, I reformatted / as jfs to install arch64. But somehow, I feel my system is slow (in spite of regular fscks on every ten mounts and using deadline scheduler) as compared to arch32 & ext4. I'm thinking of using btrfs on /, is it stable to the extent that I can use it on /? I guess a lot of you guys are using it here? -- Regards, Nilesh Govindarajan Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/nilesh.gr Twitter: http://twitter.com/nileshgr Website: http://www.itech7.com VPS Hosting: http://www.itech7.com/a/vps
On 22 September 2010 14:53, Nilesh Govindarajan <lists@itech7.com> wrote:
Hi,
After true multilib support came for arch, I reformatted / as jfs to install arch64. But somehow, I feel my system is slow (in spite of regular fscks on every ten mounts and using deadline scheduler) as compared to arch32 & ext4. I'm thinking of using btrfs on /, is it stable to the extent that I can use it on /? I guess a lot of you guys are using it here?
I was playing with btrfs a month or two ago, and I wouldn't recommend using for anything crucial just yet. When it works, it is great. Fast, compact, useful. But it broke on me more than one time, and it seems the support tools are not totally up for the task at the moment. Some examples: Btrfs does not handle disk-full situations gracefully, just craps itself. And when I say "full" it does not have to be completely, on the partition I tried there were times when when a few hundred MB were still free and still gave up. Does need rebalancing occasionally (maybe I should say on a regular basis for its own good, freeing up space, restoring performance) and that process did break on me too, leaving an unusable partition. I really want to like btrfs, that's why I tried, but I think there's still a way to go until I trust / with it.... Let me know if anyone has better experience than me. Cheers, Greg
On 22 September 2010 14:53, Nilesh Govindarajan <lists@itech7.com> wrote:
Hi,
After true multilib support came for arch, I reformatted / as jfs to install arch64. But somehow, I feel my system is slow (in spite of regular fscks on every ten mounts and using deadline scheduler) as compared to arch32 & ext4. I'm thinking of using btrfs on /, is it stable to the extent that I can use it on /? I guess a lot of you guys are using it here?
BTRFS is not production-ready yet, it is _very_ clear: https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page It depends on what your definition of "stable" is. JFS is not a fast filesystem, it is a low-power and low-latency all-arounder suitable for laptops/5400RPM disks.
On Wed, 22 Sep 2010 12:23:07 +0530, Nilesh Govindarajan <lists@itech7.com> wrote:
Hi,
After true multilib support came for arch, I reformatted / as jfs to install arch64. But somehow, I feel my system is slow (in spite of regular fscks on every ten mounts and using deadline scheduler) as compared to arch32 & ext4. I'm thinking of using btrfs on /, is it stable to the extent that I can use it on /? I guess a lot of you guys are using it here?
I use it on my / for about six month now and it's OK. Of course regular backups are necessary, because when it fails (happend two or three times to me), it's mostly unrepairable and you lost everything. I also noticed significant speed regressions in last kernels, but I hope it will get OK soon. To keep the the btrfs fit, you should do balancing regularly and you should try to avoid leaving btrfs in inconsistent state (like forcing unmount or turning off (not properly) PC when there's some IO - that's how I destroyed my btrfs). I agree it's not ready yet for production use, where absolute reliability, stability and constant performance are required, but I think it's ready for home use. The more users will test it, the sooner it will get ready for production use. Dan -- -- Dan Vrátil vratil@progdansoft.com Tel: +4202 732 326 870 Jabber: progdan@jabber.cz
Hmm, after reading some responses, I don't think I'll use BTRFS on /, because the power here is quite unreliable and my UPS can't guarantee proper switching (it's nearly 12 yrs old!). So, what else would you guys recommend on / in order achieve high speed and no failures if the FS was left in an inconsistent state? -- Regards, Nilesh Govindarajan Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/nilesh.gr Twitter: http://twitter.com/nileshgr Website: http://www.itech7.com VPS Hosting: http://www.itech7.com/a/vps
On Wednesday 22 September 2010 18:37:56 Nilesh Govindarajan wrote:
Hmm, after reading some responses, I don't think I'll use BTRFS on /, because the power here is quite unreliable and my UPS can't guarantee proper switching (it's nearly 12 yrs old!).
So, what else would you guys recommend on / in order achieve high speed and no failures if the FS was left in an inconsistent state?
A good hard drive and ext4. btrfs has been good for me for almost 9 months now. My backup and home partitions are on btrfs and it is as invisible as ext4, just works for me, including forced reboots from power loss. The inverter can't take the spike of power loss, especially if a fan is running somewhere and causes pc to reboot. To survive power loss, I recommend these two settings ext4 : auto_da_alloc,noatime,defaults btrfs : flushoncommit,noatime,defaults To me, btrfs has been twice as fast compared to ext4, in some situations. List archives should have more info. -- Regards Shridhar
No more experienced btrfs people here? @shridhar, from your btrfs experience, it seems it's worth a try, waiting for more positive feedbacks. -- Regards, Nilesh Govindarajan Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/nilesh.gr Twitter: http://twitter.com/nileshgr Website: http://www.itech7.com VPS Hosting: http://www.itech7.com/a/vps
I too have been using btrfs for nearly 9 months (to be precise since 18.1) as my home and var partition that are on one partition in differed sub-volumes. I have never had any problems whit it, I don't really know anythin about its speed compared to ext4 or some other filesystem, but its working fast enough for me.
On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 10:17 AM, Nilesh Govindarajan <lists@itech7.com> wrote:
No more experienced btrfs people here? @shridhar, from your btrfs experience, it seems it's worth a try, waiting for more positive feedbacks.
ive had it as / on my laptop since .31 without issue. my fiance has it as / on her netbook/ssd for about 6mo, also without issue (and it is very performant) not really doing anything fancy, ssd mount opt on the netbook, and noatime on both. i also have a server using raid1 + btrfs / since about .32, without issue. C Anthony
On 09/23/2010 05:47 PM, C Anthony Risinger wrote:
On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 10:17 AM, Nilesh Govindarajan<lists@itech7.com> wrote:
No more experienced btrfs people here? @shridhar, from your btrfs experience, it seems it's worth a try, waiting for more positive feedbacks.
ive had it as / on my laptop since .31 without issue. my fiance has it as / on her netbook/ssd for about 6mo, also without issue (and it is very performant)
I've been using btrfs for ~6 months on my laptop on / and /home (same partition, home being a subvol). It survived several unclean shutdowns without any problem. But I just went back to ext3 some days ago, even with noatime btrfs seemed rather slow. I also suspect btrfs was waking up the disk pretty often (at least thats what lm-profiler told me). Its a pity, but someday I will try it again. Christoph
It seems btrfs is really worth a try after so many positive feedbacks. Any ideas how can I format / with latest btrfs? I've the archiso on my pen drive which was released months ago, I guess it doesn't have the latest btrfs-progs? What's the method then? Create a PenArch? -- Regards, Nilesh Govindarajan Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/nilesh.gr Twitter: http://twitter.com/nileshgr Website: http://www.itech7.com VPS Hosting: http://www.itech7.com/a/vps
the archiso 2010.08 has btrfs support marked as experimental but it should work and create a working btrfs partition, but if you want newer tolls you can updte it or instlaa the git version
On Friday 24 September 2010 18:52:30 Nilesh Govindarajan wrote:
It seems btrfs is really worth a try after so many positive feedbacks. Any ideas how can I format / with latest btrfs? I've the archiso on my pen drive which was released months ago, I guess it doesn't have the latest btrfs-progs? What's the method then? Create a PenArch?
long time back I did this. # modprobe btrfs # mkfs -t btrfs <device> # mount -t btrfs <device> <mountpoint> but this was not thr. the installer but for an extra disk. and it was not for / either. btrfs progs git repo does not get updated very frequently but it remains useful for what it is. -- Regards Shridhar
On 09/24/2010 03:22 PM, Nilesh Govindarajan wrote:
It seems btrfs is really worth a try after so many positive feedbacks. Any ideas how can I format / with latest btrfs? I've the archiso on my pen drive which was released months ago, I guess it doesn't have the latest btrfs-progs? What's the method then? Create a PenArch?
I just installed the btrfs-progs-git from AUR and followed the steps from https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Conversion_from_Ext3. This, of course, works only if you currently have ext3/4 on /. Good luck, Christoph
On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 1:47 AM, Christoph Rissner <c.r@visotech.at> wrote:
On 09/24/2010 03:22 PM, Nilesh Govindarajan wrote:
It seems btrfs is really worth a try after so many positive feedbacks. Any ideas how can I format / with latest btrfs? I've the archiso on my pen drive which was released months ago, I guess it doesn't have the latest btrfs-progs? What's the method then? Create a PenArch?
I just installed the btrfs-progs-git from AUR and followed the steps from https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Conversion_from_Ext3.
This, of course, works only if you currently have ext3/4 on /.
just heads up; if you want to try the rollback stuff in mkinitcpio-btrfs (AUR), then your system _must_ live inside a subvolume (specifically... __active). the hook will do the appropriate things to prepare your system, but it will leave a "phantom" copy of the current system "under" your / that must be removed manually, AFAIK it can only be removed via `rm -rf`. way around is to get a copy of btrfs-progs during install and prep the disk. hook explains all this when booting for the first time using it. when i get some motivation to work on it, kernel rollbacks will be supported; hook needs some love to take advantage of newer btrfs features :-/, but it works just fine. C Anthony
On 09/27/2010 09:12 AM, C Anthony Risinger wrote:
just heads up; if you want to try the rollback stuff in mkinitcpio-btrfs (AUR), then your system_must_ live inside a subvolume (specifically... __active).
the hook will do the appropriate things to prepare your system, but it will leave a "phantom" copy of the current system "under" your / that must be removed manually, AFAIK it can only be removed via `rm -rf`.
way around is to get a copy of btrfs-progs during install and prep the disk.
hook explains all this when booting for the first time using it. when i get some motivation to work on it, kernel rollbacks will be supported; hook needs some love to take advantage of newer btrfs features :-/, but it works just fine.
Ah thanks, I forgot to mention your wonderful btrfs hook. It really works great, just don't forget to take snapshots before Syu'ing :-) I also added an fstab entry like: /dev/<my_root_device> /var/root btrfs noatime,defaults,subvol=. 0 0 to quickly access the "." snapshot, IIRC I could traverse down to all other snapshots from there. Bye, Christoph
On 09/24/2010 01:16 AM, Christoph Rissner wrote: I also suspect btrfs was waking up the disk pretty
often (at least thats what lm-profiler told me).
Its a pity, but someday I will try it again.
Christoph
I did notice this problem. Even without anything running I could not get my drive to spin down for over 20 seconds or so.
On 23 September 2010 11:17, Nilesh Govindarajan <lists@itech7.com> wrote:
No more experienced btrfs people here? @shridhar, from your btrfs experience, it seems it's worth a try, waiting for more positive feedbacks.
I've been running it / (SSD), /home, and /var since the beginning of the summer on my new computer. In that time I've had 2 unclean shutdowns (power outages), and haven't seen corruption, so the lack of fsck isn't unbearable.
On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 12:03 PM, Tavian Barnes <tavianator@gmail.com> wrote:
On 23 September 2010 11:17, Nilesh Govindarajan <lists@itech7.com> wrote:
No more experienced btrfs people here? @shridhar, from your btrfs experience, it seems it's worth a try, waiting for more positive feedbacks.
I've been running it / (SSD), /home, and /var since the beginning of the summer on my new computer. In that time I've had 2 unclean shutdowns (power outages), and haven't seen corruption, so the lack of fsck isn't unbearable.
ah yes i forgot to mention that; i've unlcean shutdown both my laptop and netbook more times than i can count... no issues. from the btrfs list, most people seem to have problems with unclean power down only when other layers/indirection are involved, like dm-crypt, etc. C Anthony
On 09/23/2010 12:11 PM, C Anthony Risinger wrote:
ah yes i forgot to mention that; i've unlcean shutdown both my laptop and netbook more times than i can count... no issues. from the btrfs list, most people seem to have problems with unclean power down only when other layers/indirection are involved, like dm-crypt, etc.
This is not surprising. ZFS can also have problems when put on top of some other system. These filesystems are made to be on the bare drives and generally to provide their own raid/lvm interface (though btrfs doesn't yet have a full raid implementation like zraid on ZFS). I have been running ZFS on an SSD with /, and an HD with subvolumes for /var, /tmp, /etc and /usr without any problems. Quite fond of subvolumes too, it seems like a good way to break up and even limit a directory's space without having to create a ton of separate partitions. The issues seem to be related to a few usage scenarios, and will of course continue to get better with every kernel release.
participants (10)
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C Anthony Risinger
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Christoph Rissner
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Dan Vrátil
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Gergely Imreh
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jesse jaara
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Nilesh Govindarajan
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Ray Rashif
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Shridhar Daithankar
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Steven Susbauer
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Tavian Barnes