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

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 09/23/2010 05:47 PM, C Anthony Risinger wrote:

On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 10:17 AM, Nilesh Govindarajan 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

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 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 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/ /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 23 September 2010 11:17, Nilesh Govindarajan 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 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.