-----Original Message----- From: Anton Aylward <opensuse@antonaylward.com> To: opensuse@opensuse.org Subject: [opensuse] Paying with the "future": Btrfs Grub2, systemd Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2013 12:53:34 -0500 Out of curiosity I pulled a scratch machine from 'the closet of anxiety' (it was labelled as having a dab disk) found another disk and some memory and the openSuse 12.2 installation DVD, oh and a DVD drive that worked, and .... Set up an install that used BtrFS, grub2 and systemd I left it to run overnight and came in just now and found a big red/orange error message saying that it hadn't be able to install the user - that's me, 'anton'. I rebooted and it was all there. It booted (using grub2) and systemd. I logged in as root and hand created the 'anton' account and all was merry, merry. I had partitioned the 10G drive as swap plus a single BtrFS partition. No separate /boot. The partitioner complained that I should have a separate /boot that was ext3 or ext4. I've had problems with that before so even if I were to do that I know there would be problems later. So I have one big partition. I've played with BtrFS before in a LVM partition, but it struck me that the design and advantages of BtrFS come into play when you have the big mix of files. I do have some reservations. Classically there have been good reasons for partitioning. I recall one vulnerability that arise if /tmp was on the same fs as the root. Good reason to have a /tmp that is nosetuid, possibly even noexec. In fact the principle of least privileged means you should apply those two to trees that have no reason to have executables or privilege. Certainly /usr/share -- documentation, manuals, fonts, icons, come into that category. There's a good case that /srv/httpd/ should be restricted too, after all the scripts there are to be interpreted (by perl or php or python or ruby or whatever) rather than executed. I'll look into these security concerns when I get to play about with this scratch machine over the coming weeks. Right now all I can say is 'it works'. So far. Next to bring it to the desk and tie it to the LAN... If you have questions about running Suse purely on BtrFS I'll try to answer them. Please don't ask performance questions, this is a crappy old machine. slow disk, slow cpu, slow memory. I'm concerned with functions and hurdles. Hi Anton, After Gabor's impressive promotional tour of btrfs quite some time ago, i decided to have a go with brtfs, with my 4*3TB disks Untill now i've two remarks. I created a number of logical volumes of identical sizes, and formated some with brtfs and others with ext4. The netto available disk space for btrfs systems is slightly smaller than those with ext4. Also, when you completely fill the btrfs-file system, you get a nasty stack trace in syslog.... First time it scared the hell out of me. After a lvextend + btrfs filesystem resize max, blue sky again. Other thing is (but perhaps not related to btrfs), since i did a re-install with OS_12.2 i periodically find my system frozen solid. After restart absolutely no shred of evidence what might have caused it. (might very well be hw related though) hw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org