On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 9:34 AM, Anton Aylward <opensuse@antonaylward.com> wrote:
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?
As Carlos said the whole thread is worth reading: http://markmail.org/message/b5zmpqluenaq4fi5 The bug in question for failed RPM install is: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=835695 I don't know about you, but it seems very strange that a filesystem has a feature that has to be "enabled" before ImageMagick's rpm can be installed. It looks like openSUSE is considering that feature stable enough to enable it by default for 13.1, but I doubt 12.3 ever gets that mount option by default. Note: you can use btrfstune to enable the relatively new extrefs feature.
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.
It's not a inode issue. Here's a 4-year thread that discusses it. The default limit is around 300 hardlinks in a single directory. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.file-systems.btrfs/3427 The new extrefs feature solves that but at least for now is not a always available filesystem feature.
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!
I believe there are 2 issues: 1) df used to show disk free and included the snapshots as part of freespace. That is simply wrong because df would show space, but you could not create files. Has it been fixed in 12.2 / 12.3 / 13.1? (I don't have btrfs on my laptop currently so I don't know.) 2) snapper's default config keeps way too many snapshots in 12.3 and before. For 13.1 they are reducing the default number kept.
But this is an incredibly useful feature and filling up the file system is not restricted to BtrFS.
Here's a btrfs FALSE filesystem full bug that has not been resolved in 12.3: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=828229 Note it started reporting full when only about 9 TB of the 17 TB had been written. This does not appear to be a snapshot issue, but some other btrfs kernel bug. Take a look at bugzilla: https://bugzilla.novell.com/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=btrfs 24 open bugs related to btrfs. It might be usable by many for a lot of circumstances, but to say it is stable in 12.3 and before is just not accurate. And even if the kernel is deemed stable for 13.1, then there is the userspace tools that need updates to work well with btrfs underlying them. Based on the factory thread I suspect btrfs will be made the default install filesystem for 13.2 and a raft of new bugs and fixes will be going into 13.2 fyi: 13.1 has already been branched off of factory and factory has been at least to some extent unfrozen and is accepting updates destined for 13.2. Major changes are still not welcome in factory for now. I don't know if changing the default install filesystem would be acceptable now or not. Greg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org