3 ms·

Love using Btrfs; the is no better filesystem than it nowadays that it's reliability issues have been fixed.

mdip 7y ago
I tend to agree with you here -- reliability has been a non-issue for me, though I've never configured `btrfs` in its RAID configuration. Performance becomes an issue in certain cases, but in every one that I've encountered, adjusting configuration has resolved the problems to my satisfaction. Would my Windows 10 VM run better under a different filesystem, rather than `btrfs` with various tweaks applied? Reading relatively recent articles on the subject would suggest that it would, however, I'd rather work with a single filesystem type and understand its strengths/weaknesses than manage two different filesystems as long as I can get performance to a usable state.
- ansible 7y ago
  We have run btrfs in RAID configuration, but that has usability issues, even just doing RAID-1. We've switched back to using MD (mdadm) for RAID-1 setup, and then using btrfs on top of that for the snapshots, send / receive, block-level CRC and such. Dealing with failed drives isn't as easy with btrfs as it is with Linux MD.
pmarreck 7y ago
I have to beg to differ here as I had a different experience that I literally just posted about to Reddit yesterday https://www.reddit.com/r/zfs/comments/eu1qsj/a_tale_of_two_filesystems/ https://www.reddit.com/r/zfs/comments/eu1qsj/a_tale_of_two_f... tl;dr Unbeknownst to me I had a bad drive cable for an external NVMe enclosure that was causing intermittent I/O errors (only during high drive utilization) that went undetected by BTRFS and slowly corrupted my drive, eventually leading to an unbootable and unrepairable system (and to be fair, I should have scrubbed instead of attempting btrfsck --repair from another booted drive, but I don't care what you say, a --repair function should NOT potentially cause FURTHER corruption if it is at all available in the tooling! Like, just fucking rip it out if it can potentially make things worse, or recode the damn thing to just act defensively... jeez) Wiped the drive and started over with Ubuntu 19.10 and its new integrated ZFS on Root support... ZFS detected the IO issue pretty much instantly and prevented further errors by freezing I/O. Swapped the cable out during my troubleshooting and the issue went away. Also, drive is plenty fast, read test at 800MB/s
- xzcat 7y ago
  I'll throw in my own anecdote. ZFS on root caused me a significant amount of headache when the proxmox node I was using it on just randomly decided it wasn't going to boot anymore. The ZFS pools were fine, no data was lost, but no amount of messing with it fixed the zfsonroot and it was quite difficult to find quality search results for. And of course it was a weekend where my parents and siblings and in-laws were visiting, so I had the joy of going around messing with DNS settings wherever someone had a device that only paid attention to the first two DNS servers in the DHCP settings. (I've since changed my DNS setup- now I only have a primary self-hosted one that's on an RPi in my networking cabinet, and the second entry is Google. I figure if I only get two servers that are respected for real, I'm making sure one of them is google.)
  - Filligree 7y ago
    That's really a packaging issue, not a ZFS issue, but I feel your pain. The best suggestion I can offer is to use a distribution that treats it like a first-class citizen, such as... well, the Ubuntu support is still beta level, so only NixOS for now.
  - nickik 7y ago
    That's why FS integration into the kernel would have been so important for the whole software ecosystem.
  - lostlogin 7y ago
    > I only have a primary self-hosted one that's on an RPi in my networking cabinet, and the second entry is Google. I was under the impression that there was no such thing as primary and secondary for DNS, just ‘here is one’ and ‘here is another’, with someone going for a terrible naming system of ‘primary’ and secondary’. I’m no expert and my knowledge come from messing about with Pihole and reading their documentation.
    - jmcnulty 7y ago
      The first nameserver listed in resolv.conf is kind of a primary as it will always be consulted first, unless you add "options rotate". The next nameserver only come into play if the first doesn't respond (default 5 seconds, also tunable with options). They're not named primary/secondary in the file but could be considered that way.
pantalaimon 7y ago
> nowadays that it's reliability issues have been fixed Is this also true for RAID5/6?
- jxcl 7y ago
  This issue has its own wiki page on the BTRFS wiki: https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/RAID56 https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/RAID56 So, no, that particular issue hasn't been fixed.
  - 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
    > * For data, it should be safe as long as a scrub is run immediately after any unclean shutdown.* That’s unfortunate. Does the scrub run automatically in those situations? Consumer hardware will be the most prone to intermittent power failure.
- sp332 7y ago
  There are some big caveats there. https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/RAID56 https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/RAID56
buttersbrian 7y ago
is it considered better than ZFS?
Dylan16807 7y ago
Does that include performance reliability? It wasn't very long ago that I had BTRFS drives on two separate systems develop crippling performance issues, with random delays increasing up to seconds, and the filesystem going unresponsive for even longer when I deleted snapshots. I think something about the performance was degrading every time an hourly snapshot was made, even though the system only kept a couple dozen of them at a time.

mdip 7y ago

I tend to agree with you here -- reliability has been a non-issue for me, though I've never configured `btrfs` in its RAID configuration. Performance becomes an issue in certain cases, but in every one that I've encountered, adjusting configuration has resolved the problems to my satisfaction. Would my Windows 10 VM run better under a different filesystem, rather than `btrfs` with various tweaks applied? Reading relatively recent articles on the subject would suggest that it would, however, I'd rather work with a single filesystem type and understand its strengths/weaknesses than manage two different filesystems as long as I can get performance to a usable state.

ansible 7y ago
We have run btrfs in RAID configuration, but that has usability issues, even just doing RAID-1. We've switched back to using MD (mdadm) for RAID-1 setup, and then using btrfs on top of that for the snapshots, send / receive, block-level CRC and such. Dealing with failed drives isn't as easy with btrfs as it is with Linux MD.

pmarreck 7y ago

I have to beg to differ here as I had a different experience that I literally just posted about to Reddit yesterday https://www.reddit.com/r/zfs/comments/eu1qsj/a_tale_of_two_filesystems/ https://www.reddit.com/r/zfs/comments/eu1qsj/a_tale_of_two_f... tl;dr Unbeknownst to me I had a bad drive cable for an external NVMe enclosure that was causing intermittent I/O errors (only during high drive utilization) that went undetected by BTRFS and slowly corrupted my drive, eventually leading to an unbootable and unrepairable system (and to be fair, I should have scrubbed instead of attempting btrfsck --repair from another booted drive, but I don't care what you say, a --repair function should NOT potentially cause FURTHER corruption if it is at all available in the tooling! Like, just fucking rip it out if it can potentially make things worse, or recode the damn thing to just act defensively... jeez) Wiped the drive and started over with Ubuntu 19.10 and its new integrated ZFS on Root support... ZFS detected the IO issue pretty much instantly and prevented further errors by freezing I/O. Swapped the cable out during my troubleshooting and the issue went away. Also, drive is plenty fast, read test at 800MB/s

xzcat 7y ago
I'll throw in my own anecdote. ZFS on root caused me a significant amount of headache when the proxmox node I was using it on just randomly decided it wasn't going to boot anymore. The ZFS pools were fine, no data was lost, but no amount of messing with it fixed the zfsonroot and it was quite difficult to find quality search results for. And of course it was a weekend where my parents and siblings and in-laws were visiting, so I had the joy of going around messing with DNS settings wherever someone had a device that only paid attention to the first two DNS servers in the DHCP settings. (I've since changed my DNS setup- now I only have a primary self-hosted one that's on an RPi in my networking cabinet, and the second entry is Google. I figure if I only get two servers that are respected for real, I'm making sure one of them is google.)
- Filligree 7y ago
  That's really a packaging issue, not a ZFS issue, but I feel your pain. The best suggestion I can offer is to use a distribution that treats it like a first-class citizen, such as... well, the Ubuntu support is still beta level, so only NixOS for now.
- nickik 7y ago
  That's why FS integration into the kernel would have been so important for the whole software ecosystem.
- lostlogin 7y ago
  > I only have a primary self-hosted one that's on an RPi in my networking cabinet, and the second entry is Google. I was under the impression that there was no such thing as primary and secondary for DNS, just ‘here is one’ and ‘here is another’, with someone going for a terrible naming system of ‘primary’ and secondary’. I’m no expert and my knowledge come from messing about with Pihole and reading their documentation.
  - jmcnulty 7y ago
    The first nameserver listed in resolv.conf is kind of a primary as it will always be consulted first, unless you add "options rotate". The next nameserver only come into play if the first doesn't respond (default 5 seconds, also tunable with options). They're not named primary/secondary in the file but could be considered that way.

pantalaimon 7y ago

> nowadays that it's reliability issues have been fixed Is this also true for RAID5/6?

jxcl 7y ago
This issue has its own wiki page on the BTRFS wiki: https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/RAID56 https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/RAID56 So, no, that particular issue hasn't been fixed.
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
  > * For data, it should be safe as long as a scrub is run immediately after any unclean shutdown.* That’s unfortunate. Does the scrub run automatically in those situations? Consumer hardware will be the most prone to intermittent power failure.
sp332 7y ago
There are some big caveats there. https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/RAID56 https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/RAID56

buttersbrian 7y ago

is it considered better than ZFS?

Dylan16807 7y ago

Does that include performance reliability? It wasn't very long ago that I had BTRFS drives on two separate systems develop crippling performance issues, with random delays increasing up to seconds, and the filesystem going unresponsive for even longer when I deleted snapshots. I think something about the performance was degrading every time an hourly snapshot was made, even though the system only kept a couple dozen of them at a time.