15 ms·

Windows on Btrfs

503 points by susam 4y ago

biorach 4y ago
I highly recommend the Windows BTRFS driver.
- remram 4y ago
  Recommend it for what?
  - actionfromafar 4y ago
    Compression and copy-on-write, perhaps.
speed_spread 4y ago
Too bad the article doesn't talk about performance vs NTFS. Any quick and dirty comparative benchmark would have been nice. But then again, If BTRFS had been slower than NTFS it could have been due to a suboptimal (re)implementation.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  I think nothing these days can perform worse than NTFS. I’ve been using Windows on my corporate issue laptop and anything that includes disk IO is a huge pain.
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    Some amount of that might be coming from Windows Defender and similar, but yeah NTFS isn't exactly a speed demon.
    - garaetjjte 4y ago
      Nothing particularly wrong with NTFS, it's Windows filesystem architecture that is slow.
      - solarkraft 4y ago
        I can't find it right now, but I believe there was a talk from a Rust maintainer a while ago about the Rust installation being way slower than it should be, which was almost entirely a rant on Windows file system performance.
        ygra 4y ago
        That one perhaps? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbKGw8MQ0i8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbKGw8MQ0i8 I don't recall it particularly ranty, though.
        solarkraft 4y ago
        That's it, thank you! I chose the word because I remembered it being a bit rant-adjacent ("we're used to doing it this way, ... but windows does it that way"). But it's been a while since I watched it (not particularly attentively either, to be honest). That's just what stuck.
      - overthrow 4y ago
        I'd love to see a benchmark of NTFS on Windows vs NTFS on Linux. Unfortunately ntfs-3g uses FUSE so right now it's not really a fair comparison.
        mappu 4y ago
        Linux has an upstream kernel driver for NTFS, you don't need fuse ntfs-3g any more (well, they have different quirks such as how UNIX permissions are emulated). The readwrite driver is new, but it always had an older readonly driver too, which would be fine for benchmarking. Back in 2011 Tuxera's proprietary Linux NTFS driver was maybe faster than ext as well: https://www.phoronix.com/news/OTU5Ng https://www.phoronix.com/news/OTU5Ng
  - ntauthority 4y ago
    On Windows, I can enumerate a directory that accidentally got millions of files perfectly fine without the system itself breaking and with results being returned incrementally. On Linux/ext4, it takes an eternity for an enumeration to even start returning results and the entire OS gets stuck on IO while doing so.
    - rbanffy 4y ago
      True, but that's not a common enough use case to optimize for. I'd prefer Windows updates happened at the same speed Linux ones do.
- Rimintil 4y ago
  This is due to file system filter [drivers], not the file system. NTFS is perfectly fine and performs well.
  - dboreham 4y ago
    Hmm. I thought the problem was that NTFS is not particularly fast at file creation. Generally not a problem, except for the folks who wrote the npm tooling which generates 10,000 files in the blink of an eye.
    - Rimintil 4y ago
      Yep, I feel (a little) bad for anyone doing node development on Windows (though I probably should feel bad that they're having to dev in JS). But this isn't an "NTFS problem" as you'll have this occur on any filesystem that supports file system filters, like antivirus.
- brucethemoose2 4y ago
  I benchmarked both with a cross platform program. btrfs is massively slower on windows, especially with random IO (but also with sequential). Its even more disparate with compression turned on both. I cant remember the linux results... not that it matters, as I avoid NTFS writes on linux like the plague, even with the new kernel driver. Just this year, I tried trusting it for a little while, and linux ntfs killed an entire backup HDD by corrupting the partition table :/. Mounting NTFS as read only is OK though.
dmitrygr 4y ago
Nobody asked for this, wanted this, or imagined it. But it was done and it is epic! A tip of my hat!
kitsunesoba 4y ago
Interesting, I would've expected more Windows software to just assume NTFS with some fallbacks for (ex)fat given how there haven't really been any other options for quite some time. How stable is Btrfs these days? Remember reading years ago that it was bad about spontaneously corrupting itself for no apparent reason. Curious if something similar is possible with ZFS.
- curt15 4y ago
  >How stable is Btrfs these days? Remember reading years ago that it was bad about spontaneously corrupting itself for no apparent reason. On one hand, Fedora and SUSE default to Btrfs. On the other hand, data corruption bugs are still being unearthed [1]: [1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2169947 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2169947.
  - Arnavion 4y ago
    FWIW I've been using btrfs for the root partition for a decade without any (observed) corruption problems. This is across multiple installs of OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on laptops and PCs, HDDs and SSDs and most recently an SD card. Back in the day it needed manual intervention to rebalance but that is automated now. Also, OpenSUSE's update program automatically takes pre- and post- snapshots, and these snapshots have saved me a lot of headache from botched upgrades.
    - solarkraft 4y ago
      Same here. Never had to do anything, with the notable exception of it being somewhat annoying to recover when the disk is full (which is why I've started to keep subvolumes that I can quickly delete). But I'm not running a RAID, which I believe is where almost all of the data corruption has happened.
      - dontlaugh 4y ago
        I’ve settled on unraid with btrfs partly for that reason.
skanga 4y ago
Can someone please explain the advantages of doing this?
- dgunay 4y ago
  During my transition period from Windows to Linux, I stored the majority of my games on my NTFS drive because it was much bigger and I wanted them available on Windows in case they didn't work on Proton. I could play them from Linux with ntfs-3g but some of them would just refuse to launch unless I moved them a non-NTFS drive. Maybe they would've worked in this scenario? Hard to say.
- csdvrx 4y ago
  Why keep different filesystems outside of specific performance needs? I've experimented with weirder things, like Linux running on NTFS with the new kernel driver.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    > Linux running on NTFS with the new kernel driver. As the root file system? Does that work?
    - csdvrx 4y ago
      Well enough if you know what you're doing :) With posix perms, users and everything, there's no reason it shouldn't!
- rbanffy 4y ago
  It forces you to understand how Windows functions on unexpected conditions and that knowledge can be extrapolated to other situations where something on Windows fails for no apparent reason and you just know it because you saw it before. Do not underestimate the power of arcane knowledge.
- xaduha 4y ago
  This is a science experiment.
AshamedCaptain 4y ago
I am sure this will break the second time you run Windows Update.
- csdvrx 4y ago
  > I am sure this will break the second time you run Windows Update. Then you are confidently wrong, because Windows Update rarely (if ever) touches the bootloader, while this is the main innovation of the WinBTRFS project.
  - AshamedCaptain 4y ago
    Until the day it touches it and replaces your selection from the UEFI firmware. Or repartitions the recovery partition. Or decides to move the recovery partition from the beginning of the disk to the end of the disk. All stuff I have personally seen Windows Update do. I am sure your custom bootloader will not be overwritten. All types of hell can happen, borking the entire installation -- and your bootloader will still be perfectly fine.
    - viraptor 4y ago
      Windows update moving partitions around automatically? Have you got a reference for that?
      - csdvrx 4y ago
        There won't be any reference, as touching other OS partitions never happened for real. For the rest, there could be references, but it's just lingering legends now: yes, in the past, it could happen BUT only for the Windows partitions (recovery 2700, efi EF00, msr 0701 c: 0700) and only if your partition was too small for a specific update. Then windows would do some careful resizing, in the worst case creating another partition out of its C: to avoid touching the rest. So it would't break anything, just like how ntfsresize works on linux! For the selection from the UEFI, it was only if you used the default bootx64.efi and tried to repair the boot (windows detected this is not normal and would replace it by something to chainload bootmgfw.efi with) Anyway, since Windows 10 it doesn't happen, and I never had any problem at all with 11. Just use the recommended partition size (or more, I regularly make my EFI 4Gb), name your bootloader something else than bootx64.efi and it will be fine. The most windows might do is to reorder your UEFI boot entries (then go to settings and you can boot another system, same in recovery: just select your linux UKI or grub EFI)
rbanffy 4y ago
A more sensible approach would be to have a separate data volume to store important stuff on and leave it as BtrFS while letting Windows and Windows software run off NTFS. But, then, what’d be the fun of having a computer you don’t need to fix?
qbasic_forever 4y ago
Haha wow that is so ridiculous it's awesome. Seeing both the Linux root and Windows root with Program Files living right next to usr, etc. is _wild_. Very cool hack!
- chmod775 4y ago
  Given there's now native NTFS support in the Linux kernel, you could also do that that the other way around.
  - flatiron 4y ago
    I guess that paragon driver got merged. I remember the pull request…
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    I wonder which direction causes more breakage for the non-native OS.
    - jwrallie 4y ago
      I think getting around permissions would be an issue but when I was starting on Linux I remember there was a way to install to Fat32 inside a directory in parallel with Windows 95. The distro was called Phat, so the concept is not exactly new.
      - watmough 4y ago
        Yep, just posted about this. Late 90's right? I think it was Ygdrassil, or maybe a free distro off of a CD. Great investment of time as it got me into the oilfield doing tech support. Running Rocky 8 on a P1 Gen4 now, so come a long way from my 486/Dx2.
    - sebazzz 4y ago
      I suppose you could store the chmod and group/owner in an NTFS alternative data stream, or reserve a special file on the file system that acts like the MFT.
nwellinghoff 4y ago
Awesome. Would love to see some performance marks.
- brucethemoose2 4y ago
  Its not good, see my above posts. But TBH its like this on linux too. BTRFS is a feature heavy CoW filesystem like ZFS, not a "light," intentionally low overhead fs like ext4 or f2fs (which is what I benched on linux).
LukeShu 4y ago
I'm intending to write up some docs and announce it in the next few days, but since this thread is here, I might as well mention it now: On the topic of alternative btrfs implementations, I've been working on https://git.lukeshu.com/btrfs-progs-ng/ https://git.lukeshu.com/btrfs-progs-ng/ which is written entirely in Go. Its `btrfs-rec inspect mount --pv=/dev/whatever` is a read-only FUSE implementation of btrfs that is more fault-tolerant (of corrupt filesystems) than the normal in-kernel btrfs driver (and even more tolerant than `btrfs rescue` or `btrfs recover`). It's still missing a bit; RAID almost certainly doesn't work, and encryption is not implemented. But hopefully some folks will find it useful, or at least neat! Oh, comparison with the existing https://github.com/adam900710/btrfs-fuse https://github.com/adam900710/btrfs-fuse : (1) Again, mine has better fault tolerance, (2) but mine is read-only, (3) mine supports xattrs (TODO in Adam's), (4) mine supports separate inode address spaces for subvolumes (Adam's doesn't due to limitations in FUSE, mine works around this by lazily setting up separate mountpoints for each subvolume).
- michaelmrose 4y ago
  That is really neat have you considered contributing this to btrfs as a recovery option or putting out an ISO with this as a recovery tool?
  - LukeShu 4y ago
    I do intend to contribute it to the main btrfs-progs. Like I said, I've got some things to write up in the next few days to try to accomplish that.
- Conan_Kudo 4y ago
  > On the topic of alternative btrfs implementations, I've been working on https://git.lukeshu.com/btrfs-progs-ng/ https://git.lukeshu.com/btrfs-progs-ng/ which is written entirely in Go. Is this actually a blessed "next-generation" implementation? If not, could you please rename it so it doesn't confuse people?
  - tadfisher 4y ago
nailer 4y ago
Whoa. So why didn’t the Windows store work? Some kind of trusted environment thing?
- netsharc 4y ago
  There are some hints in this document, like the OS needing to lock down installed app files: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/msix/desktop/desktop-to-uwp-behind-the-scenes https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/msix/desktop/deskt... Or this issue: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/visualstudio-docs/issues/3359 https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/visualstudio-docs/issues/33...
- csdvrx 4y ago
  In Linux terms, think about what would happen if you tried to use ACL (or fsattr or whatever non standard stuff) on a filesystem not supporting ACL: it would throw weird errors, and you may not properly handle them if you expected all filesystems to support ACLs.
  - nailer 4y ago
    User land generally doesn’t care about file system specifics. Even in your ACL, example, opening a file would succeed or fail. I suspect this is much more likely to be a secure environment issue. Windows store wants to prevent piracy, there is no way the environment can be trusted because the boot loader wasn’t signed by Microsoft, and therefore may be modified to help people pirate software.
    - brucethemoose2 4y ago
      Even if you dont boot with btrfs, the store doesn't even recognize a btrfs partition as a valid drive for apps.
solarkraft 4y ago
Pretty cool, apart from the fact that it's Windows you're booting. But what's up with UWP apps not working?
- ElectricalUnion 4y ago
  The C:\Program Files\WindowsApps (or the equivalent X:\WindowsApps on other disks) needs some very specific ACL settings or the UWP sandbox will throw fits and refuse to start.
EvanAnderson 4y ago
This is really cool and speaks to the modularity of the Windows file system stack. I love projects that customize Windows (working against its closed-source nature). There’s an OpenZFS port to Windows[0]. I wonder if my hopes of having ZFS on Windows (including the boot drive, because I would love to be able to snapshot and rollback) would actually be possible. [0] https://github.com/openzfsonwindows/openzfs https://github.com/openzfsonwindows/openzfs
- infogulch 4y ago
  The author has refactored their branch with guidance and promoted their draft pr to open last month. https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/14034 https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/14034
- lostmsu 4y ago
  But Windows lets you snapshot and rollback via Volume Shadow Copying (System Restore in UI + 3rd party tool Shadow Explorer to browse snapshots).
  - EvanAnderson 4y ago
    Having used both VSS and ZFS fairly heavily I much prefer the ZFS experience. It seems more predictable and reliable in fulfilling its function. I am pretty strongly pro-Windows NT. I think there’s a ton of good design and implementation in it. (The parts of NT that came from Win32 are the more irritating parts.) VSS isn’t wholly unreasonable. The design seems pretty well thought-out. I particularly like the VSS providers that can interface with hardware-based snapshot mechanisms and VSS writers to allow software to quiesce IO. It’s all pretty neat, but it seems to fail to take snapshots “mysteriously” pretty often in practice. Since I can’t see the source I don’t have much chance of actually figuring out what’s going wrong either. I also like that VSS is clearly distinct from volume management and the filesystem itself. The layer violation inherent in the design of ZFS seems a bit clunky to me. In use, though, it has done very well for me and I haven’t bumped up against limitations re: volume management and redundancy being tied to the filesystem too much (probably because I’ve always come at it with the expectation that my volumes are pretty much decided at deployment time and migration means starting a fresh zpool and starting over).
Dwedit 4y ago
So how reliable is this and how long will it take before you get a badly corrupted disk?
c7DJTLrn 4y ago
Speaking of Windows storage drivers, years ago, I managed to get Windows to boot and run entirely in RAM using some fairly obscure tools from the reboot.pro forums. I always wanted to have an immutable Windows system that I could manage like cattle. Unfortunately, setting up such a system was extremely complicated and a manual process. I am aware that Windows now has a driver called UWF that functions a bit like an overlay filesystem and can create ephemeral overlays, but it's not quite the same as booting and running in RAM. It's also only available in Enterprise unless you enable it via registry edits.
- userbinator 4y ago
  WinPE does that.
- ilyt 4y ago
  I did that for lulz few times in Linux when I didn't wanted to fuck up with some old server's boot when I was decommissioning it. Just make a big file in /dev/shm, add it via loopback to LVM and migrate system partition on it, then run shred on drives without the annoying messages kernel screams when it has its storage destroyed underneath
- robotnikman 4y ago
  UWF does come in handy for things like thin clients from my experience.
- bentcorner 4y ago
  You can boot Windows off a VHDX, which might serve your same needs. I'm running like this right now - it has a few quirks but works pretty well.
- jaclaz 4y ago
  JFYI, nowadays (if you have enough RAM) we have a good driver that can load Windows both as a Ramdisk and as Filedisk (using a VHD or RAW image) booting via grub4dos or grub4EFI, SVBUS: http://reboot.pro/index.php?showtopic=21787 http://reboot.pro/index.php?showtopic=21787 https://sourceforge.net/projects/svbus/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/svbus/ http://mistyprojects.co.uk/documents/SVBus/index.htm http://mistyprojects.co.uk/documents/SVBus/index.htm
jasoneckert 4y ago
I've always thought filesystem compatibility between OSes should be a priority. Moreover, I've never understood why Microsoft developed ReFS instead of adopting ZFS.
- klodolph 4y ago
  Yeah, so the semantics of the filesystem APIs on Windows is very different, so you're not going to easily port filesystem code to Windows from other operating systems. ZFS is CDDL and that won't fly on Linux. Linux filesystem code is GPL2 and that won't fly on macOS. Licensing is a bitch.
- overthrow 4y ago
  Probably license issues - same reason Linus won't add ZFS to the linux kernel. https://itsfoss.com/linus-torvalds-zfs/ https://itsfoss.com/linus-torvalds-zfs/ If Linus is afraid of Oracle, MS should definitely be afraid
  - lern_too_spel 4y ago
    More likely Microsoft doesn't want its OS features to be controlled by a third party. The issues with using ZFS in Linux stem from the GPL. Neither Windows nor MacOS are affected.
userbinator 4y ago
It's good to see projects like this which basically confirm what we know about the modularity of the filesystem layer in Windows. In fact, the IFS API that enables this has been there since MS-DOS 4: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Installable_File_System https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Installable_File_System Although I'm sure that Windows would have some issues with that as XP was the last version that let you boot off of FAT32 I remember it being not too difficult to boot Vista and 7 from FAT32, although the official installer wouldn't let you.
- mise_en_place 4y ago
  I was wondering about that too, specifically how ZwCreateFile and other file i/o functions would work. But if they're using a file system filter then it's not an issue. I'm curious where \\Device and \\DosDevices goes, considering Windows device files and their symlinks are there. I guess they just put them in under /?
- nly 4y ago
  Linux supports a dozen filesystems and has FUSE for userspace. It's nice Windows can do things too though I guess.
sneed_chucker 4y ago
Interesting. ReactOS has supported btrfs for a while, it's even an option when installing. Of course, ReactOS isn't really functional as of writing.
apatheticonion 4y ago
Related tangent: Something I don't fully understand (perhaps I just haven't found a project that facilitates it) is why there isn't a Windows extension (driver?) that allows for native mounting of ext4 partitions within Windows explorer. Surely, given the Linux native file system is open source, adding the ability to mount ext4 partitions natively should be something people can add to Windows? I have seen third party applications with custom file explorers that can open ext4 partitions (in the same way you open a 7zip file) and I also understand you can mount linux partitions via WSL to access them via explorer - I would just love it if there was a way to natively mount ext4 in the Windows shell. Up until now I have been using NTFS as my "universal" format - for drives shared between Windows, Linux and MacOS. I think exfat has recently gained support in all three platforms but it's not reliable for an internal hard drive (I think?).
- p_l 4y ago
  There used to be an ext2 driver for NT, I think opensource even, but there simply had not been enough interest to keep it updated or built for newer versions
- dale_glass 4y ago
  > Related tangent: Something I don't fully understand (perhaps I just haven't found a project that facilitates it) is why there isn't a Windows extension (driver?) that allows for native mounting of ext4 partitions within Windows explorer. Such projects have long existed, but I suspect there's a lack of interest. It's a difficult technical problem with a narrow usage niche. You need somebody who wants both Windows and Linux, and wants to use the same physical disks. Today, why bother? You can use a NAS, cloud storage, virtualization, etc.
  - leoc 4y ago
    Wanting to dual-boot sometimes isn't that rare, surely. And local storage for documents remains popular too. It seems to reflect the reality that serious Linux development effort has been very server-focussed for a long time.
mrb 4y ago
"The btrfs driver for Windows is incredibly solid" Hyperboles can be a fun writing style, but of course, it's not incredibly solid: https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs/issues https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs/issues This is an exciting project though!
brucethemoose2 4y ago
My laptop is a small Windows + Arch (f2fs) partitions + a big btrfs "cold storage" partition. Some notes: - "The btrfs driver for Windows is incredibly solid" is true... but (on NVMe) its also extremely slow. Like dramatically slower than NTFS, with or without compression. - You can share data, but writing with winbtrfs will screw up the permissions on linux unless you get the mount options exactly right. - Booting windows and ntfs conversion: there be dragons. The MS store isnt the only thing that breaks...
pmarreck 4y ago
"Windows on ZFS" would be both far more impressive and horribly extend Windows' utility
heavyset_go 4y ago
This is insane and I love/hate it. Besides the MS Store stuff, which I try to avoid anyway as, in my experience, trying to launch them on Windows via SSH doesn't always work because of permissions, it's interesting as this opens up the ability to possibly dual boot windows from a subvolume without separate partitions/drives.
29athrowaway 4y ago
I/O in Windows XP is faster than Windows 11. 22 years of development for nothing.
- alliao 4y ago
  nooo serious?
KingLancelot 4y ago
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redder23 4y ago
Btrfs still has no native encryption right? There is Dislocker that lets you open Windows partions encryption with Bitlocker. I switched from btrfs to zfs because Ubuntu has it naively integrated into the install. There was some issues about it recently about possible removal or some tools because badly maintained though. So if I want everything encrypted this is not helping me. Opening LUKS from Windows project is dead I think. But I am fine this way I basically have not booted up Windows up for gaming in months. And this one way sharing with Dislocker is enough for me. I think btrfs and zfs are rather a hasse on personal desktop systems, you just loose lots of space for snapshots you not really need, well I needed them on OpenSuse tumblweed because it was unstable but I since switched to Ubuntu LTS and I do not need them.
- KAMSPioneer 4y ago
  If I recall correctly, the removal is the ZFS Event Daemon from Ubuntu, not ZFS itself. Which is pretty much fine; it was never finished anyway. Ambitious project with which Canonical seems to have bitten off more than it can chew... However a cursory search doesn't turn up any more info, so, grain of salt.
Thorrez 4y ago
> I forgot to take screenshots but it was the AMD stuff from the Microsoft Store failing to launch. What does AMD mean here? AMD the processor company? I don't see how that is related to changing the filesystem.
- krylon 4y ago
  GPU or chipset drivers, maybe?
- mst 4y ago
  I think it's the "from the Microsoft Store" part that's going wrong, and it just so happens the author noticed it on AMD-related store installed stuff.
dybber 4y ago
A performance comparison on simple file operations would be cool to see!
- brucethemoose2 4y ago
  See my above reply. Winbtrfs is massively slower on an NVMe drive... but still plenty usable.
ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
"Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." —Dr. Ian Malcolm
paines 4y ago
Regardless of how cool this is, which I truly think, won't this "break" tons of apps and tools? NTFS and (V)FAT(32) arent't case sensitive and I have seen tons of projects which will fopen file.xy regardless if the file was created as File.xy or fIle.xy or FILE.xy.... (you get the picture).
- Kwpolska 4y ago
  NTFS is case-sensitive internally and you can have case-sensitive files or directories. Back when WSL1 was the only version, I tried to compile some C++ stuff with MSVC. I ran `git clone` in WSL but cloned to the Windows partition. Visual Studio complained that EXAMPLE.H could not be found, even though it was there, except it looked like "example.h" in Explorer. (WSL2 does not use this feature, since cross-OS file access is done via network shares, and Linux files live in a virtual disk image.)
levidos 4y ago
One life tip I've learned is that the Windwos Store's .msixbundle packages are just zip files that you can extract and usually will run fine. Change the .msixbundle extension to .zip, and open with 7-zip. Inside the archive, open & extract the appropriate .msix file for your architecture. Now you have Windows Terminal Portable. (I've done this with other apps too) To obtain a download link for a Windows Store package, you need to go to third party websites where you input the Windows Store URL, and it gives you the download link. Make sure the download link is from Microsoft domain. But in Windows Terminal's case, the bundle is published on their Github so you can download directly. If you want the Cascadia Code font, you need to install it manually by double clicking on the font from the package.
- pl4nty 4y ago
  The defacto website for downloading bundles (rg-adguard) is closed-source and hosted alongside questionable content, so I run an OSS version here: https://msft-store.tplant.com.au/ https://msft-store.tplant.com.au/
ur-whale 4y ago
To me, this article goes a very long way to demonstrate how screwed up people's thinking is in the windows users world. I mean, let's look at this objectively: the guy is amazed because he actually managed to boot windows off of a non MS-sanctioned software stack. There's nothing amazing here: these things should be the standard, and it pretty much is the case in the open-source world. And I certainly don't mean to diminish the technical achievement of the folks who stitched this together, quite the contrary, very nice feat. But what I'm trying to say: instead of being amazed because they managed to pull it off, they should be demanding this kind of inter-operability between components of the steaming pile of shite that is windows in 2023.
javier2 4y ago
I gave up on running windows because of the difficulty of sharing files with linux. So now I run only Linux. Some kind of native support for btrfs in windows would be great!
sebazzz 4y ago
If the BRTFS driver on Windows would implement setting ACLs I think that the Windows Store apps would work fine. The reason the probably fail is because those apps run within a Sandbox with limited permissions and need the right ACLs to run. You could then even hide all Linux directories of you wanted.
atoav 4y ago
I was running a dual boot system: - Linux on Btrfs - Windows on NTFS The Btrfs driver on windows allowed me to read and write Linux files from windows and the other way around. For my use cases this worked quite okay.
issafram 4y ago
FYI you don't need Windows Store to install Terminal. You can download it from a browser as well
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IronWolve 4y ago
I hate the new windows store container method of installing software. Its acts like an untouchable, unreadable, off limits container.
einpoklum 4y ago
Title should be: Windows and Linux - btr(fs) together!
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Windows on Btrfs

503 points by susam 4y ago

biorach 4y ago

I highly recommend the Windows BTRFS driver.

remram 4y ago
Recommend it for what?
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  Compression and copy-on-write, perhaps.

speed_spread 4y ago

Too bad the article doesn't talk about performance vs NTFS. Any quick and dirty comparative benchmark would have been nice. But then again, If BTRFS had been slower than NTFS it could have been due to a suboptimal (re)implementation.

rbanffy 4y ago
I think nothing these days can perform worse than NTFS. I’ve been using Windows on my corporate issue laptop and anything that includes disk IO is a huge pain.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  Some amount of that might be coming from Windows Defender and similar, but yeah NTFS isn't exactly a speed demon.
  - garaetjjte 4y ago
    Nothing particularly wrong with NTFS, it's Windows filesystem architecture that is slow.
    - solarkraft 4y ago
      I can't find it right now, but I believe there was a talk from a Rust maintainer a while ago about the Rust installation being way slower than it should be, which was almost entirely a rant on Windows file system performance.
      - ygra 4y ago
        That one perhaps? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbKGw8MQ0i8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbKGw8MQ0i8 I don't recall it particularly ranty, though.
        solarkraft 4y ago
        That's it, thank you! I chose the word because I remembered it being a bit rant-adjacent ("we're used to doing it this way, ... but windows does it that way"). But it's been a while since I watched it (not particularly attentively either, to be honest). That's just what stuck.
    - overthrow 4y ago
      I'd love to see a benchmark of NTFS on Windows vs NTFS on Linux. Unfortunately ntfs-3g uses FUSE so right now it's not really a fair comparison.
      - mappu 4y ago
        Linux has an upstream kernel driver for NTFS, you don't need fuse ntfs-3g any more (well, they have different quirks such as how UNIX permissions are emulated). The readwrite driver is new, but it always had an older readonly driver too, which would be fine for benchmarking. Back in 2011 Tuxera's proprietary Linux NTFS driver was maybe faster than ext as well: https://www.phoronix.com/news/OTU5Ng https://www.phoronix.com/news/OTU5Ng
- ntauthority 4y ago
  On Windows, I can enumerate a directory that accidentally got millions of files perfectly fine without the system itself breaking and with results being returned incrementally. On Linux/ext4, it takes an eternity for an enumeration to even start returning results and the entire OS gets stuck on IO while doing so.
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    True, but that's not a common enough use case to optimize for. I'd prefer Windows updates happened at the same speed Linux ones do.
Rimintil 4y ago
This is due to file system filter [drivers], not the file system. NTFS is perfectly fine and performs well.
- dboreham 4y ago
  Hmm. I thought the problem was that NTFS is not particularly fast at file creation. Generally not a problem, except for the folks who wrote the npm tooling which generates 10,000 files in the blink of an eye.
  - Rimintil 4y ago
    Yep, I feel (a little) bad for anyone doing node development on Windows (though I probably should feel bad that they're having to dev in JS). But this isn't an "NTFS problem" as you'll have this occur on any filesystem that supports file system filters, like antivirus.
brucethemoose2 4y ago
I benchmarked both with a cross platform program. btrfs is massively slower on windows, especially with random IO (but also with sequential). Its even more disparate with compression turned on both. I cant remember the linux results... not that it matters, as I avoid NTFS writes on linux like the plague, even with the new kernel driver. Just this year, I tried trusting it for a little while, and linux ntfs killed an entire backup HDD by corrupting the partition table :/. Mounting NTFS as read only is OK though.

dmitrygr 4y ago

Nobody asked for this, wanted this, or imagined it. But it was done and it is epic! A tip of my hat!

kitsunesoba 4y ago

Interesting, I would've expected more Windows software to just assume NTFS with some fallbacks for (ex)fat given how there haven't really been any other options for quite some time. How stable is Btrfs these days? Remember reading years ago that it was bad about spontaneously corrupting itself for no apparent reason. Curious if something similar is possible with ZFS.

curt15 4y ago
>How stable is Btrfs these days? Remember reading years ago that it was bad about spontaneously corrupting itself for no apparent reason. On one hand, Fedora and SUSE default to Btrfs. On the other hand, data corruption bugs are still being unearthed [1]: [1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2169947 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2169947.
- Arnavion 4y ago
  FWIW I've been using btrfs for the root partition for a decade without any (observed) corruption problems. This is across multiple installs of OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on laptops and PCs, HDDs and SSDs and most recently an SD card. Back in the day it needed manual intervention to rebalance but that is automated now. Also, OpenSUSE's update program automatically takes pre- and post- snapshots, and these snapshots have saved me a lot of headache from botched upgrades.
  - solarkraft 4y ago
    Same here. Never had to do anything, with the notable exception of it being somewhat annoying to recover when the disk is full (which is why I've started to keep subvolumes that I can quickly delete). But I'm not running a RAID, which I believe is where almost all of the data corruption has happened.
    - dontlaugh 4y ago
      I’ve settled on unraid with btrfs partly for that reason.

skanga 4y ago

Can someone please explain the advantages of doing this?

dgunay 4y ago
During my transition period from Windows to Linux, I stored the majority of my games on my NTFS drive because it was much bigger and I wanted them available on Windows in case they didn't work on Proton. I could play them from Linux with ntfs-3g but some of them would just refuse to launch unless I moved them a non-NTFS drive. Maybe they would've worked in this scenario? Hard to say.
csdvrx 4y ago
Why keep different filesystems outside of specific performance needs? I've experimented with weirder things, like Linux running on NTFS with the new kernel driver.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  > Linux running on NTFS with the new kernel driver. As the root file system? Does that work?
  - csdvrx 4y ago
    Well enough if you know what you're doing :) With posix perms, users and everything, there's no reason it shouldn't!
rbanffy 4y ago
It forces you to understand how Windows functions on unexpected conditions and that knowledge can be extrapolated to other situations where something on Windows fails for no apparent reason and you just know it because you saw it before. Do not underestimate the power of arcane knowledge.
xaduha 4y ago
This is a science experiment.

AshamedCaptain 4y ago

I am sure this will break the second time you run Windows Update.

csdvrx 4y ago
> I am sure this will break the second time you run Windows Update. Then you are confidently wrong, because Windows Update rarely (if ever) touches the bootloader, while this is the main innovation of the WinBTRFS project.
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  Until the day it touches it and replaces your selection from the UEFI firmware. Or repartitions the recovery partition. Or decides to move the recovery partition from the beginning of the disk to the end of the disk. All stuff I have personally seen Windows Update do. I am sure your custom bootloader will not be overwritten. All types of hell can happen, borking the entire installation -- and your bootloader will still be perfectly fine.
  - viraptor 4y ago
    Windows update moving partitions around automatically? Have you got a reference for that?
    - csdvrx 4y ago
      There won't be any reference, as touching other OS partitions never happened for real. For the rest, there could be references, but it's just lingering legends now: yes, in the past, it could happen BUT only for the Windows partitions (recovery 2700, efi EF00, msr 0701 c: 0700) and only if your partition was too small for a specific update. Then windows would do some careful resizing, in the worst case creating another partition out of its C: to avoid touching the rest. So it would't break anything, just like how ntfsresize works on linux! For the selection from the UEFI, it was only if you used the default bootx64.efi and tried to repair the boot (windows detected this is not normal and would replace it by something to chainload bootmgfw.efi with) Anyway, since Windows 10 it doesn't happen, and I never had any problem at all with 11. Just use the recommended partition size (or more, I regularly make my EFI 4Gb), name your bootloader something else than bootx64.efi and it will be fine. The most windows might do is to reorder your UEFI boot entries (then go to settings and you can boot another system, same in recovery: just select your linux UKI or grub EFI)

rbanffy 4y ago

A more sensible approach would be to have a separate data volume to store important stuff on and leave it as BtrFS while letting Windows and Windows software run off NTFS. But, then, what’d be the fun of having a computer you don’t need to fix?

qbasic_forever 4y ago

Haha wow that is so ridiculous it's awesome. Seeing both the Linux root and Windows root with Program Files living right next to usr, etc. is _wild_. Very cool hack!

chmod775 4y ago
Given there's now native NTFS support in the Linux kernel, you could also do that that the other way around.
- flatiron 4y ago
  I guess that paragon driver got merged. I remember the pull request…
- josephcsible 4y ago
  I wonder which direction causes more breakage for the non-native OS.
  - jwrallie 4y ago
    I think getting around permissions would be an issue but when I was starting on Linux I remember there was a way to install to Fat32 inside a directory in parallel with Windows 95. The distro was called Phat, so the concept is not exactly new.
    - watmough 4y ago
      Yep, just posted about this. Late 90's right? I think it was Ygdrassil, or maybe a free distro off of a CD. Great investment of time as it got me into the oilfield doing tech support. Running Rocky 8 on a P1 Gen4 now, so come a long way from my 486/Dx2.
  - sebazzz 4y ago
    I suppose you could store the chmod and group/owner in an NTFS alternative data stream, or reserve a special file on the file system that acts like the MFT.

nwellinghoff 4y ago

Awesome. Would love to see some performance marks.

brucethemoose2 4y ago
Its not good, see my above posts. But TBH its like this on linux too. BTRFS is a feature heavy CoW filesystem like ZFS, not a "light," intentionally low overhead fs like ext4 or f2fs (which is what I benched on linux).

LukeShu 4y ago

I'm intending to write up some docs and announce it in the next few days, but since this thread is here, I might as well mention it now: On the topic of alternative btrfs implementations, I've been working on https://git.lukeshu.com/btrfs-progs-ng/ https://git.lukeshu.com/btrfs-progs-ng/ which is written entirely in Go. Its `btrfs-rec inspect mount --pv=/dev/whatever` is a read-only FUSE implementation of btrfs that is more fault-tolerant (of corrupt filesystems) than the normal in-kernel btrfs driver (and even more tolerant than `btrfs rescue` or `btrfs recover`). It's still missing a bit; RAID almost certainly doesn't work, and encryption is not implemented. But hopefully some folks will find it useful, or at least neat! Oh, comparison with the existing https://github.com/adam900710/btrfs-fuse https://github.com/adam900710/btrfs-fuse : (1) Again, mine has better fault tolerance, (2) but mine is read-only, (3) mine supports xattrs (TODO in Adam's), (4) mine supports separate inode address spaces for subvolumes (Adam's doesn't due to limitations in FUSE, mine works around this by lazily setting up separate mountpoints for each subvolume).

michaelmrose 4y ago
That is really neat have you considered contributing this to btrfs as a recovery option or putting out an ISO with this as a recovery tool?
- LukeShu 4y ago
  I do intend to contribute it to the main btrfs-progs. Like I said, I've got some things to write up in the next few days to try to accomplish that.
Conan_Kudo 4y ago
> On the topic of alternative btrfs implementations, I've been working on https://git.lukeshu.com/btrfs-progs-ng/ https://git.lukeshu.com/btrfs-progs-ng/ which is written entirely in Go. Is this actually a blessed "next-generation" implementation? If not, could you please rename it so it doesn't confuse people?
- tadfisher 4y ago

nailer 4y ago

Whoa. So why didn’t the Windows store work? Some kind of trusted environment thing?

netsharc 4y ago
There are some hints in this document, like the OS needing to lock down installed app files: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/msix/desktop/desktop-to-uwp-behind-the-scenes https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/msix/desktop/deskt... Or this issue: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/visualstudio-docs/issues/3359 https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/visualstudio-docs/issues/33...
csdvrx 4y ago
In Linux terms, think about what would happen if you tried to use ACL (or fsattr or whatever non standard stuff) on a filesystem not supporting ACL: it would throw weird errors, and you may not properly handle them if you expected all filesystems to support ACLs.
- nailer 4y ago
  User land generally doesn’t care about file system specifics. Even in your ACL, example, opening a file would succeed or fail. I suspect this is much more likely to be a secure environment issue. Windows store wants to prevent piracy, there is no way the environment can be trusted because the boot loader wasn’t signed by Microsoft, and therefore may be modified to help people pirate software.
  - brucethemoose2 4y ago
    Even if you dont boot with btrfs, the store doesn't even recognize a btrfs partition as a valid drive for apps.

solarkraft 4y ago

Pretty cool, apart from the fact that it's Windows you're booting. But what's up with UWP apps not working?

ElectricalUnion 4y ago
The C:\Program Files\WindowsApps (or the equivalent X:\WindowsApps on other disks) needs some very specific ACL settings or the UWP sandbox will throw fits and refuse to start.

EvanAnderson 4y ago

This is really cool and speaks to the modularity of the Windows file system stack. I love projects that customize Windows (working against its closed-source nature). There’s an OpenZFS port to Windows[0]. I wonder if my hopes of having ZFS on Windows (including the boot drive, because I would love to be able to snapshot and rollback) would actually be possible. [0] https://github.com/openzfsonwindows/openzfs https://github.com/openzfsonwindows/openzfs

infogulch 4y ago
The author has refactored their branch with guidance and promoted their draft pr to open last month. https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/14034 https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/14034
lostmsu 4y ago
But Windows lets you snapshot and rollback via Volume Shadow Copying (System Restore in UI + 3rd party tool Shadow Explorer to browse snapshots).
- EvanAnderson 4y ago
  Having used both VSS and ZFS fairly heavily I much prefer the ZFS experience. It seems more predictable and reliable in fulfilling its function. I am pretty strongly pro-Windows NT. I think there’s a ton of good design and implementation in it. (The parts of NT that came from Win32 are the more irritating parts.) VSS isn’t wholly unreasonable. The design seems pretty well thought-out. I particularly like the VSS providers that can interface with hardware-based snapshot mechanisms and VSS writers to allow software to quiesce IO. It’s all pretty neat, but it seems to fail to take snapshots “mysteriously” pretty often in practice. Since I can’t see the source I don’t have much chance of actually figuring out what’s going wrong either. I also like that VSS is clearly distinct from volume management and the filesystem itself. The layer violation inherent in the design of ZFS seems a bit clunky to me. In use, though, it has done very well for me and I haven’t bumped up against limitations re: volume management and redundancy being tied to the filesystem too much (probably because I’ve always come at it with the expectation that my volumes are pretty much decided at deployment time and migration means starting a fresh zpool and starting over).

Dwedit 4y ago

So how reliable is this and how long will it take before you get a badly corrupted disk?

c7DJTLrn 4y ago

Speaking of Windows storage drivers, years ago, I managed to get Windows to boot and run entirely in RAM using some fairly obscure tools from the reboot.pro forums. I always wanted to have an immutable Windows system that I could manage like cattle. Unfortunately, setting up such a system was extremely complicated and a manual process. I am aware that Windows now has a driver called UWF that functions a bit like an overlay filesystem and can create ephemeral overlays, but it's not quite the same as booting and running in RAM. It's also only available in Enterprise unless you enable it via registry edits.

userbinator 4y ago
WinPE does that.
ilyt 4y ago
I did that for lulz few times in Linux when I didn't wanted to fuck up with some old server's boot when I was decommissioning it. Just make a big file in /dev/shm, add it via loopback to LVM and migrate system partition on it, then run shred on drives without the annoying messages kernel screams when it has its storage destroyed underneath
robotnikman 4y ago
UWF does come in handy for things like thin clients from my experience.
bentcorner 4y ago
You can boot Windows off a VHDX, which might serve your same needs. I'm running like this right now - it has a few quirks but works pretty well.
jaclaz 4y ago
JFYI, nowadays (if you have enough RAM) we have a good driver that can load Windows both as a Ramdisk and as Filedisk (using a VHD or RAW image) booting via grub4dos or grub4EFI, SVBUS: http://reboot.pro/index.php?showtopic=21787 http://reboot.pro/index.php?showtopic=21787 https://sourceforge.net/projects/svbus/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/svbus/ http://mistyprojects.co.uk/documents/SVBus/index.htm http://mistyprojects.co.uk/documents/SVBus/index.htm

jasoneckert 4y ago

I've always thought filesystem compatibility between OSes should be a priority. Moreover, I've never understood why Microsoft developed ReFS instead of adopting ZFS.

klodolph 4y ago
Yeah, so the semantics of the filesystem APIs on Windows is very different, so you're not going to easily port filesystem code to Windows from other operating systems. ZFS is CDDL and that won't fly on Linux. Linux filesystem code is GPL2 and that won't fly on macOS. Licensing is a bitch.
overthrow 4y ago
Probably license issues - same reason Linus won't add ZFS to the linux kernel. https://itsfoss.com/linus-torvalds-zfs/ https://itsfoss.com/linus-torvalds-zfs/ If Linus is afraid of Oracle, MS should definitely be afraid
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  More likely Microsoft doesn't want its OS features to be controlled by a third party. The issues with using ZFS in Linux stem from the GPL. Neither Windows nor MacOS are affected.

userbinator 4y ago

It's good to see projects like this which basically confirm what we know about the modularity of the filesystem layer in Windows. In fact, the IFS API that enables this has been there since MS-DOS 4: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Installable_File_System https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Installable_File_System Although I'm sure that Windows would have some issues with that as XP was the last version that let you boot off of FAT32 I remember it being not too difficult to boot Vista and 7 from FAT32, although the official installer wouldn't let you.

mise_en_place 4y ago
I was wondering about that too, specifically how ZwCreateFile and other file i/o functions would work. But if they're using a file system filter then it's not an issue. I'm curious where \\Device and \\DosDevices goes, considering Windows device files and their symlinks are there. I guess they just put them in under /?
nly 4y ago
Linux supports a dozen filesystems and has FUSE for userspace. It's nice Windows can do things too though I guess.

sneed_chucker 4y ago

Interesting. ReactOS has supported btrfs for a while, it's even an option when installing. Of course, ReactOS isn't really functional as of writing.

apatheticonion 4y ago

Related tangent: Something I don't fully understand (perhaps I just haven't found a project that facilitates it) is why there isn't a Windows extension (driver?) that allows for native mounting of ext4 partitions within Windows explorer. Surely, given the Linux native file system is open source, adding the ability to mount ext4 partitions natively should be something people can add to Windows? I have seen third party applications with custom file explorers that can open ext4 partitions (in the same way you open a 7zip file) and I also understand you can mount linux partitions via WSL to access them via explorer - I would just love it if there was a way to natively mount ext4 in the Windows shell. Up until now I have been using NTFS as my "universal" format - for drives shared between Windows, Linux and MacOS. I think exfat has recently gained support in all three platforms but it's not reliable for an internal hard drive (I think?).

p_l 4y ago
There used to be an ext2 driver for NT, I think opensource even, but there simply had not been enough interest to keep it updated or built for newer versions
dale_glass 4y ago
> Related tangent: Something I don't fully understand (perhaps I just haven't found a project that facilitates it) is why there isn't a Windows extension (driver?) that allows for native mounting of ext4 partitions within Windows explorer. Such projects have long existed, but I suspect there's a lack of interest. It's a difficult technical problem with a narrow usage niche. You need somebody who wants both Windows and Linux, and wants to use the same physical disks. Today, why bother? You can use a NAS, cloud storage, virtualization, etc.
- leoc 4y ago
  Wanting to dual-boot sometimes isn't that rare, surely. And local storage for documents remains popular too. It seems to reflect the reality that serious Linux development effort has been very server-focussed for a long time.

mrb 4y ago

"The btrfs driver for Windows is incredibly solid" Hyperboles can be a fun writing style, but of course, it's not incredibly solid: https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs/issues https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs/issues This is an exciting project though!

brucethemoose2 4y ago

My laptop is a small Windows + Arch (f2fs) partitions + a big btrfs "cold storage" partition. Some notes: - "The btrfs driver for Windows is incredibly solid" is true... but (on NVMe) its also extremely slow. Like dramatically slower than NTFS, with or without compression. - You can share data, but writing with winbtrfs will screw up the permissions on linux unless you get the mount options exactly right. - Booting windows and ntfs conversion: there be dragons. The MS store isnt the only thing that breaks...

pmarreck 4y ago

"Windows on ZFS" would be both far more impressive and horribly extend Windows' utility

heavyset_go 4y ago

This is insane and I love/hate it. Besides the MS Store stuff, which I try to avoid anyway as, in my experience, trying to launch them on Windows via SSH doesn't always work because of permissions, it's interesting as this opens up the ability to possibly dual boot windows from a subvolume without separate partitions/drives.

29athrowaway 4y ago

I/O in Windows XP is faster than Windows 11. 22 years of development for nothing.

alliao 4y ago
nooo serious?

KingLancelot 4y ago

[dead]

redder23 4y ago

Btrfs still has no native encryption right? There is Dislocker that lets you open Windows partions encryption with Bitlocker. I switched from btrfs to zfs because Ubuntu has it naively integrated into the install. There was some issues about it recently about possible removal or some tools because badly maintained though. So if I want everything encrypted this is not helping me. Opening LUKS from Windows project is dead I think. But I am fine this way I basically have not booted up Windows up for gaming in months. And this one way sharing with Dislocker is enough for me. I think btrfs and zfs are rather a hasse on personal desktop systems, you just loose lots of space for snapshots you not really need, well I needed them on OpenSuse tumblweed because it was unstable but I since switched to Ubuntu LTS and I do not need them.

KAMSPioneer 4y ago
If I recall correctly, the removal is the ZFS Event Daemon from Ubuntu, not ZFS itself. Which is pretty much fine; it was never finished anyway. Ambitious project with which Canonical seems to have bitten off more than it can chew... However a cursory search doesn't turn up any more info, so, grain of salt.

Thorrez 4y ago

> I forgot to take screenshots but it was the AMD stuff from the Microsoft Store failing to launch. What does AMD mean here? AMD the processor company? I don't see how that is related to changing the filesystem.

krylon 4y ago
GPU or chipset drivers, maybe?
mst 4y ago
I think it's the "from the Microsoft Store" part that's going wrong, and it just so happens the author noticed it on AMD-related store installed stuff.

dybber 4y ago

A performance comparison on simple file operations would be cool to see!

brucethemoose2 4y ago
See my above reply. Winbtrfs is massively slower on an NVMe drive... but still plenty usable.

ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago

"Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." —Dr. Ian Malcolm

paines 4y ago

Regardless of how cool this is, which I truly think, won't this "break" tons of apps and tools? NTFS and (V)FAT(32) arent't case sensitive and I have seen tons of projects which will fopen file.xy regardless if the file was created as File.xy or fIle.xy or FILE.xy.... (you get the picture).

Kwpolska 4y ago
NTFS is case-sensitive internally and you can have case-sensitive files or directories. Back when WSL1 was the only version, I tried to compile some C++ stuff with MSVC. I ran `git clone` in WSL but cloned to the Windows partition. Visual Studio complained that EXAMPLE.H could not be found, even though it was there, except it looked like "example.h" in Explorer. (WSL2 does not use this feature, since cross-OS file access is done via network shares, and Linux files live in a virtual disk image.)

levidos 4y ago

One life tip I've learned is that the Windwos Store's .msixbundle packages are just zip files that you can extract and usually will run fine. Change the .msixbundle extension to .zip, and open with 7-zip. Inside the archive, open & extract the appropriate .msix file for your architecture. Now you have Windows Terminal Portable. (I've done this with other apps too) To obtain a download link for a Windows Store package, you need to go to third party websites where you input the Windows Store URL, and it gives you the download link. Make sure the download link is from Microsoft domain. But in Windows Terminal's case, the bundle is published on their Github so you can download directly. If you want the Cascadia Code font, you need to install it manually by double clicking on the font from the package.

pl4nty 4y ago
The defacto website for downloading bundles (rg-adguard) is closed-source and hosted alongside questionable content, so I run an OSS version here: https://msft-store.tplant.com.au/ https://msft-store.tplant.com.au/

ur-whale 4y ago

To me, this article goes a very long way to demonstrate how screwed up people's thinking is in the windows users world. I mean, let's look at this objectively: the guy is amazed because he actually managed to boot windows off of a non MS-sanctioned software stack. There's nothing amazing here: these things should be the standard, and it pretty much is the case in the open-source world. And I certainly don't mean to diminish the technical achievement of the folks who stitched this together, quite the contrary, very nice feat. But what I'm trying to say: instead of being amazed because they managed to pull it off, they should be demanding this kind of inter-operability between components of the steaming pile of shite that is windows in 2023.

javier2 4y ago

I gave up on running windows because of the difficulty of sharing files with linux. So now I run only Linux. Some kind of native support for btrfs in windows would be great!

sebazzz 4y ago

If the BRTFS driver on Windows would implement setting ACLs I think that the Windows Store apps would work fine. The reason the probably fail is because those apps run within a Sandbox with limited permissions and need the right ACLs to run. You could then even hide all Linux directories of you wanted.

atoav 4y ago

I was running a dual boot system: - Linux on Btrfs - Windows on NTFS The Btrfs driver on windows allowed me to read and write Linux files from windows and the other way around. For my use cases this worked quite okay.

issafram 4y ago

FYI you don't need Windows Store to install Terminal. You can download it from a browser as well

katherin_231 4y ago

[dead]

IronWolve 4y ago

I hate the new windows store container method of installing software. Its acts like an untouchable, unreadable, off limits container.

einpoklum 4y ago

Title should be: Windows and Linux - btr(fs) together!

sassyand6745 4y ago

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classy654 4y ago

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