Greg Freemyer said the following on 10/02/2013 08:35 AM:
Is btrfs in 12.2 - now considered "stable" yet ?
I've been using BtrFS with 12.3 since I installed 12.3 shortly after it came out. Apart from a small swap partition the whole of the disk is one huge great BtrFS partition. There is no separate /boot. All of /var/ /usr /home are in the one huge partition. I figured if BtrFS can optimise then let it optimise the hell out of things :-) It works read good, I've had no disappointments. Yes fsck is missing but I've had no problems.
No, nor in 12.3. There are RPMs that won't even install if the destination is btrfs.
I've not observed this; certainly non of the base packages and certainly none of the media tools I've installed. Rather than just rumours can you give specific examples and I'll see what happens when I try them.
The issue is limited links (hard? / soft?).
I've never heard of that, can you give references please? Oh right, I have a big disk so that's not likely to happen. I suppose on a small partition you can run out of inodes -- which is what limited links really means - even with ext4. I did that with 11.4/ext3 and its one reason I stuck with ReiserFS. File systems might have limits but the idea of setting aside a fixed area for inodes is so ... well V7FS-ish.
Also snapper and btrfs have negative interactions in 12.3 that can fill your disk prematurely if you have root or /usr on btrfs. If root is full I think you have to boot to rescue mode to delete excess snapshots when it happens.
NO! The reality is that snapper is configurable. Once, just once I thought my disk was filling, and saw that it was because snapper was taking backups every time I did a 'zypper up'. I can see how valuable this is in a corporate setting, it means I can back out of specific updates! Fine, but this is my desktop and I don't need that and turned it off. You can too. RTFM. It helps to read the release notes and realise you are getting this and turn it off before you've accumulated about 28G of updates and start thinking WTF? is going on. Stupid me! But this is an incredibly useful feature and filling up the file system is not restricted to BtrFS. Also making root /usr too small is a problem that goes way way back. Its why I recommend using LVM and ReiserFS, or some other FS that can shrink and grow. Not XFS, it can only grow. You may find that you over-estimated a file system and need to scavenge from it to enlarge another FS. And ReiserFS is a b-tree file system so you'll not have to worry about adjusting the inode space...
There is serious discussion on factory of declaring a subset of the btrfs features stable for root usage with 13.1 due out next month.
The issue with BtrFS isn't simply stable/unstable as a binary choice so much as, well I keep pointing out Context is Everything and the issue is "are you going to be operating in one of the unstable areas?" My desktop: browsing; email; some documentation; reading PDF papers; some photo editing; playing a bit of music - nothing very extreme or stressing. Typical desktop for many 'home users'. No problems with BtrFS. Would I recommend it for a high stress development of photo production or music production system? No, but look where the stable and unstable features apply. You may want the large file features of ext4 or XFS. Or is this a netbook/laptop with a SSD? Then yes, BtrFS is the way to go. Context is Everything - never doubt it. And by the way, please can I have the references to the apps that won't load and the mention of running out of links/inodes with BtrFS. Failing that I'm going to consider them unsubstantiated malicious rumours. And as for ReiserFS, don't let the fact that the original designer is jailed for murder. This is a damn good FS and there have been no serious problems with it recently. Its a great example of getting things tight the first time instead of needing to constantly tweak and hack. Compare, with Internet Explorer :-) -- What makes the universe so hard to comprehend is that there's nothing to compare it with. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org