Fedora Cloud 35 Looking To Use The Btrfs File-System By Default

[ix900]

It's nice to see Fedora get on the BTRFS train, personally I've been using it for over 3 years on my openSUSE Leap and Tumbleweed systems and I'm happy with it, never had any problems.

Guess that's good because they do fix bugs

[darkbasic]

Too bad ZFS isn't mainlined. Nobody sane will support out of tree file system.

Ubuntu Server does.

[Vistaus]

Ubuntu Server does.

He said “nobody sane”

[tildearrow]

btrfs also came from Oracle originally, so what then?

CDDL.

[S.Pam]

Too bad they aren't going with ZFS.

I guess they want the flexibility to shrink and expand at will and maybe use seed devices. This isn't supported in ZFS at the moment.

[Charlie68]

Guess that's good because they do fix bugs

It's good, because the more distributions adopt it, the more people will be able to fix any problems, including bugs. This happens for any software!

[bple2137]

BTRFS has once corrupted on my PC to unrecoverable state. I liked it's snapshot features, overall speed and how lightweight it was, but it hurt me pretty bad. I needed to reinstall literally everything and thankfully I keep backups for everything important separately. Built-in recovery mechanisms are still rather limited and experimental. Not sure if I'll be able to trust it again.

[S.Pam]

BTRFS has once corrupted on my PC to unrecoverable state. I liked it's snapshot features, overall speed and how lightweight it was, but it hurt me pretty bad. I needed to reinstall literally everything and thankfully I keep backups for everything important separately. Built-in recovery mechanisms are still rather limited and experimental. Not sure if I'll be able to trust it again.

I hang out pretty much on #btrfs at irc.libera.chat and they are very helpful and assisting in data recovery.

Corruptions do happen on all filesystems. I use zfs at work and hang out on TrueNAS forums and seen people experiencing problems there too.

Usually the corruptions in btrfs happen due to bad disk firmware where write cache doesn't honor barriers. This can lead to the infamous "parent transid failed". During a powerloss or bus reset (especially on USB drives). This is because of how cow and btrees work. The internal references gets stored out of order and then btrfs can't be mounted.

The other case is human error, often in conjunction with recovery, or underlying md/lvm issues.

Each case of lost data is of course not good. My strong recommendation is to check in with https://web.libera.chat/#btrfs or the mailing list before attempting to do recovery on a failed filesystem.

Never run fsck/btrfsck unless instructed to do so by the devs in #btrfs - it can harm your ability to recover your filesystem.

[bple2137]

I hang out pretty much on #btrfs at irc.libera.chat and they are very helpful and assisting in data recovery.

Corruptions do happen on all filesystems. I use zfs at work and hang out on TrueNAS forums and seen people experiencing problems there too.

Usually the corruptions in btrfs happen due to bad disk firmware where write cache doesn't honor barriers. This can lead to the infamous "parent transid failed". During a powerloss or bus reset (especially on USB drives). This is because of how cow and btrees work. The internal references gets stored out of order and then btrfs can't be mounted.

The other case is human error, often in conjunction with recovery, or underlying md/lvm issues.

Each case of lost data is of course not good. My strong recommendation is to check in with https://web.libera.chat/#btrfs or the mailing list before attempting to do recovery on a failed filesystem.

Never run fsck/btrfsck unless instructed to do so by the devs in #btrfs - it can harm your ability to recover your filesystem.

Thanks for elaborating on the topic! That's really interesting.
The thing is, it corrupted on failure that I had with my AMD GPU as it's dying and occasionally it crashes. The system itself keeps working, but the screen is either black or I see colorful mosaic created from content it displayed before. I simply pressed reset button to reboot. And you are totally right - I tried some things to bring it back as I needed something quickly from the PC and I wasn't aware that it's not like EXT4 that can fix itself even when it's badly broken and maybe I'll lost a file or two, but otherwise it can always go back to life (at least to my experience with it on PCs and servers). That's my fault as I wasn't careful with it and things were getting worse from one minute to another. Though if I look at it from another angle, I'm just end user without deep knowledge of how the FS works, or should I? I don't try to bash the project (as I said I really like features it has), but it seems to me like susceptibility to failure. It seem normal that power supply goes down suddenly for whatever reason...

[S.Pam]

You're right. Btrfs aims to be pretty much a generic filesystem and where concepts diverge from traditional filesystems there needs to be even better documentations and clear UX with its tooling.

I can't say for sure what caused the issues in your case. Maybe bring it to the mailing list or irc chat?