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Author Topic: [EN] Experience on Btrfs  (Read 6440 times)

mylo

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[EN] Experience on Btrfs
« on: 2013/03/29, 12:24:19 »
Hi all,
I want to start experimenting with Btrfs.
Has anypne positive or negative experience on running a partition with Btrfs, while the remaining partitions on the physical drive are ext4?

timc

  • Guest
RE: Experience on Btrfs
« Reply #1 on: 2013/03/29, 13:39:07 »
Yes, I have done that and it worked very well. In fact, the #1 reason I chose Siduction over several other distros is that Siduction handled my btrfs multi-device root partition without a single problem. The other distros would handle it, but needed various workarounds.

Now, my system is completely on btrfs, on a 1.9 TB 2-drive RAID-0 volume. I have had no trouble with it and it has been running this way for almost seven months.

Good luck. Let me know if I can help with anything.

Tim

mylo

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RE: Experience on Btrfs
« Reply #2 on: 2013/03/29, 14:40:11 »
Hi timc,

thanks for your helpful experience. I think the advantages of btrfs are mostly in reduced access times or does btrfs also use the disk space more efficient?

timc

  • Guest
RE: Experience on Btrfs
« Reply #3 on: 2013/03/29, 18:19:57 »
To me, the great advantage is quick and easy volume and subvolume management, especially with multiple devices. I also have found disk write times to be very fast.

Sorry, but I am not sure about how efficient it may or may not be with disk space utilization. I have 3 TB of internal storage and another 2 of external, so space utilization is not something I really worry about. However, btrfs also has quick and easy compression, which I do use. The lzo compression actually improves overall performance.

Tim

mylo

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RE: Experience on Btrfs
« Reply #4 on: 2013/03/29, 19:30:07 »
Btrfs cannot convince me, as 86 GB in gparted mutate to 20 GB in krusader. That seem's strange to me.

Do I have to adapt ../fstab though?

Offline dibl

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RE: Experience on Btrfs
« Reply #5 on: 2013/03/29, 20:45:42 »
The only advantage I can think of to run btrfs in a partition would be if there is some reason you want snapshots of the partition.  There is no performance advantage over ext4 -- if you check the Phoronix benchmarking articles btrfs is still a bit slower than ext4.

Where btrfs really shines, and where I use it, is to make a multi-device filesystem with RAID 0 and RAID 1 characteristics. So I have 2 WD-1002FAEX SATA 3 drives in a btrfs filesystem, with about 800GB of user data on it:

Code: [Select]
root@imerabox:/# btrfs fi df /mnt/DATA
Data, RAID0: total=846.00GB, used=795.18GB
Data: total=8.00MB, used=7.62MB
System, RAID1: total=8.00MB, used=64.00KB
System: total=4.00MB, used=0.00
Metadata, RAID1: total=2.00GB, used=1.44GB
Metadata: total=8.00MB, used=0.00


It is pretty fast, and a good way to use these drives.
System76 Oryx Pro, Intel Core i7-11800H, SSD 970 EVO Plus;  Asus ROG STRIX X299-E, Core i7-7740X, Nvidia GTX-1060, dual monitors, SSD 860 EVO

mylo

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RE: Experience on Btrfs
« Reply #6 on: 2013/03/29, 22:31:46 »
Hi dibl,
thanks for your helpful informations. So I wait to using btrfs when my storage comes.
I adapted fstab from ext4 to btrfs, but the 20 GB remain. I have there an other fault, I have to detect..

Offline dibl

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RE: Experience on Btrfs
« Reply #7 on: 2013/03/30, 00:27:53 »
The /etc/fstab line to mount 2 drives with a btrfs filesystem already installed is like this:

Code: [Select]
UUID=66d73a79-8000-498b-9393-c808ca29070e     /mnt/DATA            btrfs        device=/dev/sdd,device=/dev/sde,compress=lzo,space_cache,inode_cache   0    0

You can find the necessary UUIDs with blkid:

Code: [Select]
root@imerabox:/home/don# blkid -c /dev/null -o list
device           fs_type  label     mount point          UUID
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/dev/sda1        ext2               /boot                ac7da829-aebb-46f0-806c-04a4d81a945a
/dev/sda2        swap               <swap>               0d939b7d-48f1-47dd-aebe-77e7bd8c3503
/dev/sdb1        ext4               /                    bea3a748-3411-4024-acd0-39f3882ddaf9
/dev/sdb2        ext4     SDA2      /mnt/SDA2            8cfe2acc-7572-4b45-b25f-ed021bb1d78b
/dev/sdc1        ext4     revodata  /mnt/REVODATA        ec21f5b3-7fd4-4f4b-af8d-cf787b147ae8
/dev/sdd         btrfs              (in use)             66d73a79-8000-498b-9393-c808ca29070e
/dev/sde         btrfs              (in use)             66d73a79-8000-498b-9393-c808ca29070e


Note that both /dev/sdd and /dev/sde show the same UUID -- that is the UUID of the btrfs filesystem, which was installed on both drives, according to the btrfs wiki.

If you run the simple "blkid" command, then you can see the "sub-UUID" numbers for the drives:

Code: [Select]

.
.
.
/dev/sdd: UUID="66d73a79-8000-498b-9393-c808ca29070e" UUID_SUB="81002952-c5a8-4581-9489-eb2b9a4de44f" TYPE="btrfs"
/dev/sde: UUID="66d73a79-8000-498b-9393-c808ca29070e" UUID_SUB="4f82d6d3-498a-4b0f-910f-10a891d64043" TYPE="btrfs"
System76 Oryx Pro, Intel Core i7-11800H, SSD 970 EVO Plus;  Asus ROG STRIX X299-E, Core i7-7740X, Nvidia GTX-1060, dual monitors, SSD 860 EVO

mylo

  • Guest
RE: Experience on Btrfs
« Reply #8 on: 2013/03/30, 10:26:53 »
Hi dibl,

yes I forgot to adapting the UUID. Now it works fine! Thanks!

Offline jodumont

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Re: Experience on Btrfs
« Reply #9 on: 2022/01/24, 04:45:52 »
Personally BTRfs didn't work for me
I tried twice the installation
- 1st time was: BTRfs with encryption and hibernation SWAP
- 2nd time was: BTRfs with encryption and swap in a file
both time LUKS (encryption) and MDADM (softraid) gave me a hard time and the filesystem (/) end in read only.

[UPDATE] AhhA! to be sure to not giving false impression on BTRfs, I just installed 2 more times
- 3rd: on the same computer of the 1st and 2nd try but with an encrypted ext4 without Hibernation SWAP and everything works fine.
- 4th: on a different computer with encrypted ext4 and Hibernation SWAP and I ended with the same issue around MDADM and luks with a read only filesystem.
« Last Edit: 2022/01/24, 09:04:10 by jodumont »