On 04/30/2015 12:09 PM, Rodney Baker wrote:
On Thu, 30 Apr 2015 10:50:32 Anton Aylward wrote:
On 04/30/2015 09:43 AM, Rodney Baker wrote:
Um ,yeah, there's a problem - it's called BTRFS.
;)
I'm reminded at this point about electoral politics. Example: the party whose representative didn't make it to the presidency bitches about that fact. The reality is that bitching isn't going to change that.
It isn't going to change the adoption of BtrFS.
Agreed. I'm not bitching about it, but I can choose not to use it too.
I think that's wonderful! Windows, what I've seen of OSX, even Android, doesn't seem to offer such choices as we have with Linux.
The first and only time I allowed it to install, after a few weeks I ended up with an unbootable, unfixable system. Why? Because / was full , and corrupted, and would only mount ro. The filesystem maintenance tools (if they'd been available and installed) live on /, and / has to be mounted to access them, except you can't repair a mounted filesystem, so you have to unmount it, which means you now have no filesystem checking tools...and of course the system will only boot into emergency maintenance mode, and I can't install the tools needed to fix it because zypper won't run because /var is mounted ro...
Two things. The first is obviously that BtrFS is still in development and is a moving target, and "that was then, this is now". The second is in the class of "its your own XXXXXX fault" for whatever value of XXXXXX least annoys you. When I first did this experiment I made rootfs ReiserFS as I always do and used BtrFS on /home. Scratch machine. I lost /home! But it was still bootable. I've got nothing against resuming mounted file systems can't be repaired once foooooooked. I've got nothing against booting from the repair DVD and doing whatever fsck and other stuff like chroot and mkinit. BTDT got good at it :-( But I never did get taken in by this idea that the root BtrFS should take in the rest of the file hierarchy. I've always made /home, /tmp, /var and if not /usr then at least /usr/share separate partitions. call me paranoid. Call me obsessive. I don't care. It means I have more resilient systems. I love LVM. Having /var as part of the RootFS BtrFS is crazy! It means your hourly snapshots will be HUGE!
This was about the time when I reinstalled the system from scratch using ext4...
Just like you hope the prez will do good stuff, we hope that BtrFS will get cleaned up and work properly.
Yes, and it would be nice if the distro packagers would set some sensible defaults at install time, by which I mean settings that make sure your / filesystem isn't going to be unusable in 3 months' time. At least you do have the option of disabling snapshots at install time, but how many people understand what that means and its effects (positive or negative)? Some explanation in the install process would be helpful,(but I guess the standard answer to that would be RTFM...except that these days that would need to be modified to DARTFM (Download and read...). :)
There you have it. I've never understood this thing about doing an install taking defaults. Much as I respect Chris Murphy on BtrFS and other points, his rant over (around 8th march onwards) the installation took no account of the fact that the installation is from a 'script' and can include or omit anything you want, have any defaults you want. I've done this with autoyast, reduced it to a 'trojan' that installs Linux (originally as a docker) with zero interaction and the defaults that *I* decided on. Hmm. That would make a nice trojan to carry into bestbuy .....
In the mean time you have alternatives.
Vive la choices! :)
Strangely enough the supposedly orphaned ReiserFS got a state of high reliability PDQ. Using ReiserFS on LVM offers many of the supposed advantages of BtrFS, without the hassle of snapshots running amok but without the SSD tweaks.
Interestingly, the Samsumg proprietary ssd management tools only support trim on ext4 (or NTFS on 'Doze).
I'm sticking with ReiserFS for production for the moment. I'll keep a play machine for BtrFS.
Ext4? Sorry, I'm not going to get bitten by inode exhaustion again, and i think having to massively over-provision is a ridiculous strategy. Better to have the integrated b-tree as well as the 'stuffing' of ReiserFS.
Never experienced inode exhaustion, and rotating rust is cheap these days. :)
It may be so, but backup onto USB stick is not rotating rust. My point is that ReiserFS does so much more and avoids many issues of that stupid archaism about the trade-off between inode space and data space that we've had since version 6 UNIX in the 1970s. I hated it then and I hate it now. Saying Bid Disks and over-provisioning misses the point. Backup management, unless you have a few 2T tape mechanism, is a limit. I back up to DVD or to mid size USB, though the new 128GB MicroSDXC are getting reasonable for rsync/incremental. -- My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what's really going on to be scared. P. J. Plauger, Computer Language, March 1983 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org