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Testing Btrfs On The Linux 3.16 Kernel

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  • Testing Btrfs On The Linux 3.16 Kernel

    Phoronix: Testing Btrfs On The Linux 3.16 Kernel

    When running my initial Linux 3.16 file-system tests on an SSD I had to skip over Btrfs due to initial problems with the experimental kernel code. Fortunately, Btrfs has been fixed-up in Linux 3.16 and can now serve for some benchmarking.

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    I'm planning on using btrfs on my linux system. Any specific distro I should use? Guides? Helpful tools?

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    • #3
      Originally posted by ua=42 View Post
      I'm planning on using btrfs on my linux system. Any specific distro I should use? Guides? Helpful tools?
      Works on any current distribution. You can use subvolumes instead of partitions and thus skip LVM, if you plan to use full disk encryption. Also, you can enable lzo compression by default to save some space and speed up disk access for slow hard drives. When using these subvolumes, you can easily create a cron job to snapshot these. Apart from that, it's like and other file system from the user's point of view.

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      • #4
        Originally posted by ua=42 View Post
        I'm planning on using btrfs on my linux system. Any specific distro I should use? Guides? Helpful tools?
        Just something with a newer kernel. The main btrfs wiki has most of the information you need. The Arch wiki has good info as well.

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        • #5
          Originally posted by ua=42 View Post
          I'm planning on using btrfs on my linux system. Any specific distro I should use? Guides? Helpful tools?
          I'd probably go with openSUSE personally due to the tight integration of snapper with all the tools which means that it's doing useful automatic backups, that you can easily roll-back to through a GUI.

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          • #6
            I recently tested 3.15.2 and 3.16 rc2/3 with btrfs/lzo. Only 3.16rc3 did not crash... Maybe 3.15.3 is better too, but did not check. lzo compression saved about 10% space with lots oft Steam games installed (without compression the used 120 GB SSD would be 99% full). I directly used a modified installer with lzo enabled at install time. Speed seemed to be ok with a SSD, my last test was years ago with a HD. That was basically impossibe to use with Debian because of extra slow fsync and dpkg forcing that on. Lets see how well it works the this time, recovering data from a borked filesystem did not work that well, i used older kernels before and had full data loss. Ext4 usually can recover more files, compressed data seems to be hard to recover/fix. The filesystem was not fixable in my test with older kernels...

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            • #7
              Originally posted by Kano View Post
              Speed seemed to be ok with a SSD, my last test was years ago with a HD. That was basically impossibe to use with Debian because of extra slow fsync and dpkg forcing that on.
              dpkg performance on ext4 with default options on a regular hard disk is terrible in Ubuntu too. Mounting the filesystem with barrier=0 speeds the process up massively (which I do manually if there are a lot of updates to install, or during first install).

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              • #8
                Originally posted by Luke_Wolf View Post
                I'd probably go with openSUSE personally due to the tight integration of snapper with all the tools which means that it's doing useful automatic backups, that you can easily roll-back to through a GUI.
                Yum supports snapshots via lvm or btrfs. So you should be able to use that as well. One thing, opensuse has disabled a few features of btrfs (for safety reasons), so they MAY be a better option than fedora if you don't want to fiddle with settings.

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by liam View Post
                  Yum supports snapshots via lvm or btrfs. So you should be able to use that as well. One thing, opensuse has disabled a few features of btrfs (for safety reasons), so they MAY be a better option than fedora if you don't want to fiddle with settings.
                  Does fedora have integration with snapshots for the system-config-* set? Snapper integrates with YaST for the system settings stuff too, not just the package manager related stuff.

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by ua=42 View Post
                    I'm planning on using btrfs on my linux system. Any specific distro I should use? Guides? Helpful tools?
                    I've been using btrfs for all my file systems for almost a year. Here's some general advice:
                    • Any distro with a relatively up-to-date kernel is a good choice. (Stay away from anything before 3.12.)
                    • Use separate subvolumes for / and /home. This way you can snapshot them separately (which is awesome for backups), and rollback package updates without losing your files.
                    • Programs which use large files will be a bit slower, especially if you take regular snapshots. e.g. Chrome, virtual machines. Consider disabling COW on these files (chattr +C), or keeping them on a different file system. Note that this effect is largely negligible on SSDs.
                    • Some features (send/receive, RAID5/6) are still fairly immature, but everything else is quite stable.
                    • btrfsck/btrfs check doesn't actually do anything unless you run it with --repair.
                    • If you have issues mounting, mount it with '-o recovery'.
                    • If it's a multi-disk volume and mounting it with one drive fails, mounting it with another will usually succeed and fix the issue with the first one. (Multidisk volumes are actually a rather good idea in general since the superblock and metadata are copied to both disks, even if the data is RAID0).
                    • Always keep backups. This is not specific to btrfs, but just good advice in general.

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