On 06/08/2018 04:21 PM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
Well, no, the kernel has modules for absolutely everything. It looks if you have them at run time, not install time.
Well they have modules for all currently supported filesystems - zfs isn't there, but is regularly used. I would have to look further, but it sounds like btrfs doesn't just rely on a simple kernel module for providing a full interface to all filesystem parameters, but instead requires the kernel module "plus" additional tools to be able to manipulate it. gparted seems to be able to incorporate code to handle most filesystems on its own, but it looks like it is relying on the additional tools for btrfs to garner the needed info to do what it does. You would hope in the future as btrfs development settles down that the needed bits can be incorporated in gparted and do away with external dependencies (which would eliminate the dependency cruft for those who don't use it), but as btrfs has been a moving-target for the past couple of years, it probably just made sense to gparted to call external tools to gather whatever info it needed rather than committing to endlessly having to patch and support all the development changes to the btrfs code (and what version of btrfs was currently in use by distro X release Y, etc.). -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.