Btrfs With Linux 5.12 Gets More Performance Improvements, Working Zoned Mode

[darkbasic]

sub-page block size support is now working but with more work still on the way

Wow, does it mean that I will finally be able to mount a ppc64le (64K page size) btrfs partition on x86_64?

[waxhead]

Hearing about BTRFS "improvements" while on a BTRFS filesystem scares the shit out of me.

Guess I'll have to do my backups and skip 5.12 for a few months until other people are offered as "human sacrifice" to test if it is a totally clusterfuck or not.

There are bugs in every software. How often and how easy those bugs bite is far more important. For example if you hit a bug only if your filesystem is over 500 terrabytes it is not something the majority of users would be too much concerned about. Same thing about disk arrays >32 disks.

You should always have tested backups of valuable data you care about anyway.

On the other hand... BTRFS have saved me from disaster and corruption more than once. I have been using it since before 2013 and have never lost anything. There was a nasty bug in early kernel 5.2 that hit me. However I was able to recover everything without much problems. Other non-check-summing filesystems may not complain about corruption so you never know if you data is sane in the first place and when you notice a 'blipp' in your movie/audio/picture or whatever you would know if your files has been corrupted locally or not.

BTRFS have (for me) worked flawlessly on stable LTS kernels and as long as you only use the stable features you should be better off than with just about any other filesystem. Most horror stories on the mailing list is usually due to some exotic set up, bad hardware, usb drives or old (usually non LTS) kernels.

[S.Pam]

Do any consumer drives support zones exposed to users?

[Markopolo]

Do any consumer drives support zones exposed to users?

I don’t think so. IIRC this is largely targeting enterprise drives / data centres

[S.Pam]

I don’t think so. IIRC this is largely targeting enterprise drives / data centres

It would be great if consumer SMR drives did.

[pal666]

Guess I'll have to do my backups

guess you aren't doing your backups. no wonder shit is scared out of you

[pal666]

Wow, does it mean that I will finally be able to mount a ppc64le (64K page size) btrfs partition on x86_64?

the opposite(4k partition on 64k os)
but
"
- subpage block size

• - currently read-only support
• - the read-write support is on the way, page sizes are still limited to 4K or 64K

"

[polarathene]

That feature has got nothing to do with any filesystem, not Ext4 and not BTRFS.

I didn't mean to imply it did. I stated earlier 3 different layers, FDE, filesystem, file. When I said FDE, I was thinking of the hardware equivalent SED, I wasn't aware of a software alternative that LUKS provides with dm-crypt.

The quote I responded to was querying why EXT4 was mentioned as using FDE but the BTRFS disks mentioned LUKS. I knew EXT4 supported filesystem level encryption, but didn't think of that as equivalent to FDE, so I looked into LUKS a bit to realize that was FDE via software and what I was thinking of was FDE via hardware (aka SED).

Thus my question was more about, what relevance filesystem encryption had if you had FDE(hardware/software) and file based encryption already in place.

Luks is capable of full disk encryption. Partitioning is done on top of it. That's what I did for each disk. Btrfs stripes are done on top of the luks.

The Ubuntu installer uses luks for full disk encryption. EXT4 is done on top of luks.

Ok, I thought you were originally differentiating FDE from LUKS in your message as if to say EXT4 was handled differently such as via it's filesystem encryption support.

Still curious why EXT4 is involved in your setup, what has you prefer that to be involved vs all BTRFS?

[darkbasic]

the opposite(4k partition on 64k os)

Is 64k partition on 4k os something which is currently being worked on?

[DanglingPointer]

Ok, I thought you were originally differentiating FDE from LUKS in your message as if to say EXT4 was handled differently such as via it's filesystem encryption support.

Still curious why EXT4 is involved in your setup, what has you prefer that to be involved vs all BTRFS?

Simply because it was default on installer and didn't really care too much about the tiny OS SSD disk. All my stuff is in the massive RAID5. I trust the integrity more of the BTRFS RAID5 than the OS disk. Not because it is ext4, but because it was an SSD and like I said from 7 years ago! When longevity of SSD's were not fully apreciated nor tested. It's still running now by the way! But not much happens on the OS disk besides var/log and systemD logs I suppose.