6 ms·

The ratio of bad to good posts about BTRFS always made me wonder why anyone would roll with it. Don’t put your fs in crazy.

by m1gu3l 6y ago

thomond 6y ago
Didn't Fedora transition to BTRFS as default in 33? I'm eager to see reports from that.
- enz 6y ago
  It did, but as far as I know it's effective on fresh installs only. It would be too risky to migrate automatically to Btrfs from ext4 during the 32->33 upgrade. I suspect a lot of users upgraded to 33 from 32 without seeing any problem with sticking with ext4 (including me). As a result, a lot of users are still using ext4.
encom 6y ago
Nobody posts about things that are working fine.
- curt15 6y ago
  Does OpenZFS have a similar ratio of bad to good posts?
  - washadjeffmad 6y ago
    ZFS's killer feature is religious inspiration. Write holes during resilvers are healthy and natural, but the same in a software RAID 5/6 configuration on BTRFS is unacceptably risky. Brought to you by the same people who don't think SMR disks are used with ZFS in enterprise.
    - dmm 6y ago
      Forgive me but I'm completely missing what you're saying here. Are you saying that ZFS has a write hole when reslivering?
    - viraptor 6y ago
      Raid5 on btrfs is not and has not been production ready. It's available in the code, but with appropriate warnings. You're not supposed to be using it, rather than it being "unacceptably risky".
      - mike256 6y ago
        That's the problem with btrfs. Raid5/6 still isn't production ready and loses data with cheap consumer ssd which could to disappear/reappear in a running system. On the other side raidz/z2 works rock solid. Of course I could use btrfs with mirrors instead but that's the reason why I use cheap consumer ssds. I can't spend that much money just to use btrfs so I stay with zfs.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    It doesn't, but also their changelogs aren't seen by people who browse Linux changelogs. You'd look at https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/releases https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/releases (which also contains a few bug fixes) if you're interested in zfs. Btrfs has quite a few more accidental readers.
thomaszander 6y ago
The ratio of bad to good posts has always stunned me too. But for the opposite reason. The linked post explains that there is a performance regression in a very rare and specific usecase: creating 100k files in a short span of time. And I'm not talking about unpacking boost, that's not enough files. Additionally, it will be fixed before any distro packages it. (even Arch is still on 5.9.14.) On the other hand btrfs got rather impressive speedups for fsync https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.10-Btrfs-Fsync-Faster https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.... Why are people making so much noise instead of just reporting the bug upstream when stuff goes wrong with btrfs, and why do we hear so little about the positive impact of new improvements. Almost like the people behave like customers of commercial operating systems. :-)
- scaladev 6y ago
  >creating 100k files in a short span of time. And I'm not talking about unpacking boost, that's not enough files. In JavaScript world that's really not that much. A project I've been working on has 120k+ files in node_modules, and `yarn install` creates the whole directory tree in a few seconds. It's not some obscure issue nobody ever runs into.
- minot 6y ago
  Not btrfs and anecdotal but fedora 33 / 5.8 kernel / default gnome was unusable for me on amd r5 3500U. Headphone microphone didn’t work. Bluetooth ear phones and mic didn’t work. USB headphone microphone worked though. Sure enough most of the issues were resolved by 5.9 but I can no longer recommend Linux on the desktop.
  - motakraxxer 6y ago
    With the problems you are listing, you would have never been able to recommend Linux. The problem stem from lack of driver support in the kernel for the devices on your machine. If that is the case, then your machine maker obviously does not support linux. So, it's no surprise that your machine had problems with linux. If you buy a machine that supports linux, you would not see those problems. Nothing to do with linux, mostly to do with interaction of linux and your machine manufacturer.
solarkraft 6y ago
It's not as compelling to write about positive experiences. The main competitor to btrfs is zfs, which is harder to set up, arguably more complex and has licensing issues so you can't really ship things with it built in. I like zfs on my server, but am also happy with btrfs on my laptop.
- NavinF 6y ago
  ZFS is not harder to set up imo. It's as easy as `sudo apt install zfsutils-linux` and `zpool create poolname raidz2 disk1 disk2 disk3` I've been bitten by btrfs back when it was the new hot FS, so I'll just stick to ZFS until a distributed (multiple machines) equivalent of ZFS comes along.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    > until a distributed (multiple machines) equivalent of ZFS comes along. Ceph?
    - yokem55 6y ago
      That's exactly what they want. It's got all the checksummed replication features that makes zfs awesome and it's pretty rock solid. It's even pretty resilient to dumb mistakes from the admin (ahem). Unfortunately ceph is primarily developed for folks running massive petabyte scale clusters, so setting up a home lab micro-cluster is still a fair bit more difficult than it needs to be, even with the new cephadm stuff. To wit, figuring out what the best practices for setting things up to run a small scale cluster is often guesswork and the pitfalls aren't always obvious.
      - patrakov 6y ago
        I work (well, until January) for a company that specializes in Ceph support. And it is depressing to see how many customers have crashing OSDs or MDSs, or unexplainabe memory overuse problems. It looks much worse than btrfs. I don't want this at home. But, to be fair, for every distributed storage system (even as simple as DRBD), there is be a person who had extremely negative experience with it.
bluedino 6y ago
Synology has been using BTRFS for a while, I haven't had any issues with it. https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/Btrfs https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/Btrfs
- ksec 6y ago
  Unfortunately not available on every model.
- enz 6y ago
  It's interesting to compare with QNAP, a competitor of Synology, that does not use Btrfs (they stick to ext4 with mdadm) and they explained why: https://www.qnap.com/solution/qnap-ext4/en/ https://www.qnap.com/solution/qnap-ext4/en/ However, I am really not sure if the facts they provide are still relevant today. Like always with commercial documents, that must be taken with a grain of salt.
- hda111 6y ago
  They use it just as a filesystem, like ext4. The RAID is still the classic Linux RAID because btrfs RAID isn't stable. This means BTRFS isn't able to heal itself because there is no copy of the data that BTRFS could use. I built my own NAS so I can just use ZFS with raidz, and when I ever have a silent data corruption the repair is done in a few seconds, not hours.

The ratio of bad to good posts about BTRFS always made me wonder why anyone would roll with it. Don’t put your fs in crazy.

by m1gu3l 6y ago

The ratio of bad to good posts about BTRFS always made me wonder why anyone would roll with it. Don’t put your fs in crazy.

thomond 6y ago

Didn't Fedora transition to BTRFS as default in 33? I'm eager to see reports from that.

enz 6y ago
It did, but as far as I know it's effective on fresh installs only. It would be too risky to migrate automatically to Btrfs from ext4 during the 32->33 upgrade. I suspect a lot of users upgraded to 33 from 32 without seeing any problem with sticking with ext4 (including me). As a result, a lot of users are still using ext4.

encom 6y ago

Nobody posts about things that are working fine.

curt15 6y ago
Does OpenZFS have a similar ratio of bad to good posts?
- washadjeffmad 6y ago
  ZFS's killer feature is religious inspiration. Write holes during resilvers are healthy and natural, but the same in a software RAID 5/6 configuration on BTRFS is unacceptably risky. Brought to you by the same people who don't think SMR disks are used with ZFS in enterprise.
  - dmm 6y ago
    Forgive me but I'm completely missing what you're saying here. Are you saying that ZFS has a write hole when reslivering?
  - viraptor 6y ago
    Raid5 on btrfs is not and has not been production ready. It's available in the code, but with appropriate warnings. You're not supposed to be using it, rather than it being "unacceptably risky".
    - mike256 6y ago
      That's the problem with btrfs. Raid5/6 still isn't production ready and loses data with cheap consumer ssd which could to disappear/reappear in a running system. On the other side raidz/z2 works rock solid. Of course I could use btrfs with mirrors instead but that's the reason why I use cheap consumer ssds. I can't spend that much money just to use btrfs so I stay with zfs.
- viraptor 6y ago
  It doesn't, but also their changelogs aren't seen by people who browse Linux changelogs. You'd look at https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/releases https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/releases (which also contains a few bug fixes) if you're interested in zfs. Btrfs has quite a few more accidental readers.

thomaszander 6y ago

The ratio of bad to good posts has always stunned me too. But for the opposite reason. The linked post explains that there is a performance regression in a very rare and specific usecase: creating 100k files in a short span of time. And I'm not talking about unpacking boost, that's not enough files. Additionally, it will be fixed before any distro packages it. (even Arch is still on 5.9.14.) On the other hand btrfs got rather impressive speedups for fsync https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.10-Btrfs-Fsync-Faster https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.... Why are people making so much noise instead of just reporting the bug upstream when stuff goes wrong with btrfs, and why do we hear so little about the positive impact of new improvements. Almost like the people behave like customers of commercial operating systems. :-)

scaladev 6y ago
>creating 100k files in a short span of time. And I'm not talking about unpacking boost, that's not enough files. In JavaScript world that's really not that much. A project I've been working on has 120k+ files in node_modules, and `yarn install` creates the whole directory tree in a few seconds. It's not some obscure issue nobody ever runs into.
minot 6y ago
Not btrfs and anecdotal but fedora 33 / 5.8 kernel / default gnome was unusable for me on amd r5 3500U. Headphone microphone didn’t work. Bluetooth ear phones and mic didn’t work. USB headphone microphone worked though. Sure enough most of the issues were resolved by 5.9 but I can no longer recommend Linux on the desktop.
- motakraxxer 6y ago
  With the problems you are listing, you would have never been able to recommend Linux. The problem stem from lack of driver support in the kernel for the devices on your machine. If that is the case, then your machine maker obviously does not support linux. So, it's no surprise that your machine had problems with linux. If you buy a machine that supports linux, you would not see those problems. Nothing to do with linux, mostly to do with interaction of linux and your machine manufacturer.

solarkraft 6y ago

It's not as compelling to write about positive experiences. The main competitor to btrfs is zfs, which is harder to set up, arguably more complex and has licensing issues so you can't really ship things with it built in. I like zfs on my server, but am also happy with btrfs on my laptop.

NavinF 6y ago
ZFS is not harder to set up imo. It's as easy as `sudo apt install zfsutils-linux` and `zpool create poolname raidz2 disk1 disk2 disk3` I've been bitten by btrfs back when it was the new hot FS, so I'll just stick to ZFS until a distributed (multiple machines) equivalent of ZFS comes along.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  > until a distributed (multiple machines) equivalent of ZFS comes along. Ceph?
  - yokem55 6y ago
    That's exactly what they want. It's got all the checksummed replication features that makes zfs awesome and it's pretty rock solid. It's even pretty resilient to dumb mistakes from the admin (ahem). Unfortunately ceph is primarily developed for folks running massive petabyte scale clusters, so setting up a home lab micro-cluster is still a fair bit more difficult than it needs to be, even with the new cephadm stuff. To wit, figuring out what the best practices for setting things up to run a small scale cluster is often guesswork and the pitfalls aren't always obvious.
    - patrakov 6y ago
      I work (well, until January) for a company that specializes in Ceph support. And it is depressing to see how many customers have crashing OSDs or MDSs, or unexplainabe memory overuse problems. It looks much worse than btrfs. I don't want this at home. But, to be fair, for every distributed storage system (even as simple as DRBD), there is be a person who had extremely negative experience with it.

bluedino 6y ago

Synology has been using BTRFS for a while, I haven't had any issues with it. https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/Btrfs https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/Btrfs

ksec 6y ago
Unfortunately not available on every model.
enz 6y ago
It's interesting to compare with QNAP, a competitor of Synology, that does not use Btrfs (they stick to ext4 with mdadm) and they explained why: https://www.qnap.com/solution/qnap-ext4/en/ https://www.qnap.com/solution/qnap-ext4/en/ However, I am really not sure if the facts they provide are still relevant today. Like always with commercial documents, that must be taken with a grain of salt.
hda111 6y ago
They use it just as a filesystem, like ext4. The RAID is still the classic Linux RAID because btrfs RAID isn't stable. This means BTRFS isn't able to heal itself because there is no copy of the data that BTRFS could use. I built my own NAS so I can just use ZFS with raidz, and when I ever have a silent data corruption the repair is done in a few seconds, not hours.