2 ms·

I use OpenSuse Tumbleweed with BTRFS on a laptop. This is nothing special - a 512GB SSD, no RAID, about 350GB of data and a bunch of snapshots. It was basical

I use OpenSuse Tumbleweed with BTRFS on a laptop. This is nothing special - a 512GB SSD, no RAID, about 350GB of data and a bunch of snapshots. It was basically the out of the box configuration plus some snapper config to regularly snapshot /home. One day I shut it down and it wouldn’t boot - the BTRFS filesystem had gotten itself into a state where it would mount ok read-only but hang the system when mounting read/write. My best guess is that I shut it down (meaning a normal shutdown through the GUI) while it was running its weekly rebalance in the background. I’ve since recovered the data and rebuilt the machine, but it’s the first time in a long time that I’ve had a filesystem (any filesystem) fail me.

krylon 9y ago
Huh. I had that same problem on two machines running Tumbleweed a couple of months ago. In both cases, the only working approach I found was to wipe the root partition and install from scratch. /home was in a separate partition, so it was not a tragedy, but annoying nevertheless. This has never happened to me before, unless the underlying hardware was about to retire.
- Mister_Snuggles 9y ago
  I wasn't so lucky since I had everything as one big BTRFS filesystem. I did recover it by booting the installer in recovery mode, mounting the fs read-only, and doing a backup. Then I blew away the partition table and reinstalled. I also learned a lesson about backups, mainly that I should have them.
- pnutjam 9y ago
  Tumbleweed is a rolling edge release. I get wonky desktops and other problems all the time when I update.
  - krylon 9y ago
    That is true. But I have used Gentoo, another rolling release distro, before that (way before that, actually), and I never had such a problem with Gentoo, even on the unstable branch. From what I hear Arch users tell about their distro of choice, Arch does not give them this kind of headache, either. And last but not least, the reason I took the plunge and went for Tumbleweed was that the project uses extensive automatic testing to ensure they do not break anything. Do not get me wrong, I still use Tumbleweed on both machines and do not see that changing for the foreseeable future. I know what I signed up for. ;-)

krylon 9y ago

Huh. I had that same problem on two machines running Tumbleweed a couple of months ago. In both cases, the only working approach I found was to wipe the root partition and install from scratch. /home was in a separate partition, so it was not a tragedy, but annoying nevertheless. This has never happened to me before, unless the underlying hardware was about to retire.

Mister_Snuggles 9y ago
I wasn't so lucky since I had everything as one big BTRFS filesystem. I did recover it by booting the installer in recovery mode, mounting the fs read-only, and doing a backup. Then I blew away the partition table and reinstalled. I also learned a lesson about backups, mainly that I should have them.
pnutjam 9y ago
Tumbleweed is a rolling edge release. I get wonky desktops and other problems all the time when I update.
- krylon 9y ago
  That is true. But I have used Gentoo, another rolling release distro, before that (way before that, actually), and I never had such a problem with Gentoo, even on the unstable branch. From what I hear Arch users tell about their distro of choice, Arch does not give them this kind of headache, either. And last but not least, the reason I took the plunge and went for Tumbleweed was that the project uses extensive automatic testing to ensure they do not break anything. Do not get me wrong, I still use Tumbleweed on both machines and do not see that changing for the foreseeable future. I know what I signed up for. ;-)