Btrfs To Ship Multiple Performance Improvements In The Next Linux Kernel

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Btrfs To Ship Multiple Performance Improvements In The Next Linux Kernel

Adding to the excitement around Linux 4.20~5.0 are now multiple performance improvements to the Btrfs file-system to be presented for this next Linux kernel release...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...eed-Boost-4.20

[garegin]

Is there automatic way of disabling CoW on “bad to CoW” files like VMs or bittorrent?

[Lizintacer]

Is btrfs stable for daily use? I see people regularly mention that ZFS should be used for critical data and btrfs is still a toy...

[kaprikawn]

This is great and all, but I don't think most desktop users notice much difference in filesystems, I certainly don't. The difference between a HDD and an SSD is night and day, but once you've made that leap I don't think there's much in it. I recently went from a SATA 3 SSD to an NVME m.2 drive for reasons unrelated to performance, I didn't notice anything. I use BTRFS, I doubt I'd notice any difference if I went with EXT4, or whatever the performance leader is.

Still, that's just my use case, I'm sure under different workloads, especially in the server space, this is particularly useful. And it's nice that it's getting development attention. Some people get sniffy about BTRFS due to its origin and license, and there's validity in that. But I like it, its features have been particularly useful to me.

Having said that, during my NVME upgrade, I tried to have my root partition on a BTRFS sub-volume and wasn't able to get that to work in the time I had. I know it's possible, but I gave up in the end.

[Charlie68]

Great news for me that I use with great satisfaction BTRFS!

[Michael_S]

Some people get sniffy about BTRFS due to its origin and license, and there's validity in that. But I like it, its features have been particularly useful to me.

I wasn't aware of any problems with the origin or license. It's GPLv2, just like everything else in the kernel. Are you thinking of something else, or am I unaware of some problems?

I think the problem with btrfs is that it had some stability issues, especially when a disk was full or almost completely full. I've been using it without problems for years - it's on eight drives across two machines at my house. But I am sympathetic to people that got burned by it.

[kreijack]

Is there automatic way of disabling CoW on “bad to CoW” files like VMs or bittorrent?

Sure ! You must mark the file as "nodatacow", doing a "chattr +C <filename>" on the file.
You can also set the attribute +C on the parent directory. Doing so, each new file created in the directory will inherit the nodatacow attribute.
Pay attention that disabling the COW, you loose also the checksumming protection.

[vegabook]

This is great and all, but I don't think most desktop users notice much difference in filesystems, I certainly don't. The difference between a HDD and an SSD is night and day, but once you've made that leap I don't think there's much in it. I recently went from a SATA 3 SSD to an NVME m.2 drive for reasons unrelated to performance, I didn't notice anything. I use BTRFS, I doubt I'd notice any difference if I went with EXT4, or whatever the performance leader is.

Still, that's just my use case, I'm sure under different workloads, especially in the server space, this is particularly useful. And it's nice that it's getting development attention. Some people get sniffy about BTRFS due to its origin and license, and there's validity in that. But I like it, its features have been particularly useful to me.

Having said that, during my NVME upgrade, I tried to have my root partition on a BTRFS sub-volume and wasn't able to get that to work in the time I had. I know it's possible, but I gave up in the end.

Personally, when Dropbox tanked everything but ext4, I saw Steve Job's Flash memo all over again. For desktop at least.

[garegin]

Sure ! You must mark the file as "nodatacow", doing a "chattr +C <filename>" on the file.
You can also set the attribute +C on the parent directory. Doing so, each new file created in the directory will inherit the nodatacow attribute.
Pay attention that disabling the COW, you loose also the checksumming protection.

Im talking without user intervention

[treba]

Love to hear that, excited to see the benchmarks