5 ms·

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

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.
  - prmoustache 4y ago
    I've had corruption on a btrfs root partition somewhere between last year and only this year. It was in files I wasn't really using anymore (some ssh key files on vps that weren't online anymore) so I have no idea when it really occured.
LanternLight83 4y ago
It's really matured, and although the RAID5/6 Write Hole still exists, I wouldn't reccomend a ZDEV over RAID10 either, which is what I believe offers the best tradeoffs for most users on both filesystems. Love the flexibility that BTRFS provides via eg. the balance comand, and Snapper is great for snapshot management.
LukeShu 4y ago
IMO, it became stable somewhere between 2013 and 2016. I definitely haven't had any spontaneous corruption since at least 2016 (on multiple laptops and servers; btrfs volumes that mid-double-digit of terabytes) That said, - My BDB and SQLite databases tend to corrupt if my laptop battery dies and they're on a volume that's not on LUKS. - `btrfs check` (fsck), `btrfs rescue`, and `btrfs restore` are IMO not up to snuff if you do encounter corruption (caused by something else, like a failing drive). (But I'm working on that https://git.lukeshu.com/btrfs-progs-ng/ https://git.lukeshu.com/btrfs-progs-ng/ !) - `docker build` is weirdly slow on btrfs, I always set up a separate ext4 `/var/lib/docker` volume. - I do RAID and encryption separately in MD or LVM and LUKS, so no comments from me about the stability of btrfs' built-in RAID cor encryption.
- Slix 4y ago
  > `docker build` is weirdly slow on btrfs, I always set up a separate ext4 `/var/lib/docker` volume. I'm currently doing this for a different reason. My docker builds started failing after some Ubuntu upgrade. I gave up and used ext4 for that docker directory to fix everything. https://serverfault.com/q/1127148 https://serverfault.com/q/1127148 It unsettled me because now I'm not sure whether btrfs (or docker with btrfs) is production-ready.
  - LukeShu 4y ago
    Docker has 8 different storage drivers that it can use... that's a lot, so you know they don't all get equal attention. As much as I love btrfs, it's probably fair to say that the only Docker storage driver that receives adequate attention to be production-ready is "overlay2". https://docs.docker.com/storage/storagedriver/select-storage-driver/ https://docs.docker.com/storage/storagedriver/select-storage...
- jdhendrickson 4y ago
  Any ideas on what causes the docker issue? Or have you not poked it with a stick yet?
  - 4y ago
nailer 4y ago
File systems are drivers and user space software shouldn’t really see the difference.
- flatiron 4y ago
  There is no way to have btrfs caps insensitive. So some software (poorly coded) could have capitalization issues that would not appear in NTFS that would in btrfs. But other than that I believe you are right (barring utilities specifically designed to interact with FS attributes)
  - ElectricalUnion 4y ago
    > There is no way to have btrfs caps insensitive. There is no way to make NTFS case insensitive either, it being case insensitive in Windows is a Windows implementation detail.
    - nailer 4y ago
      Does that mean windows could make any file system case insensitive?
      - ElectricalUnion 4y ago
        Any OS can "make a filesystem case insensitive"; for example in Linux you can do it if your kernel has support for it[1]. But again, that is a OS implementation detail thing, the underlying file system is still case preserving. [1] https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2020/08/27/using-the-linux-kernel-case-insensitive-feature-in-ext4/ https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2020/08/27/usin...
  - magicalhippo 4y ago
    I've been running my Samba shares case sensitive for over a decade, only issue I've found is I can't rename "Foo" to "foo" without jumping through an extra hoop (add a letter or similar). Perhaps if I ran some software off it I might find some more issues but, overall quite little. The difference in speed is immense though.
yyyk 4y ago
Well, there's ReFS as well. That experience suggests there are issues that the author might come up against following boot: Case insensitive lookup (NTFS has the option for case sensitive subdirectories but that probably doesn't matter), Mark of the Web/SQL Server (Alternate data streams support), UWP/Microsoft Store apps support (IIRC requires FS encryption support via a specific interface), DLT (Object IDs), getting DISM to work for updates... It's cool to get this far, full support will probably need a bit more work.
pxc 4y ago
There's a ZFS port for Windows but I don't think using it on the boot volume is supported. You could definitely try it, though!
doublepg23 4y ago
I enjoy it as ext4++. Would I trust it for RAID? Not particularly. There seems to be a decent amount of foot-guns still and I would greatly prefer just using ZFS. Granted, I do trust Synology using btrfs but they are also subject matter experts on the topic.
- ianlevesque 4y ago
  Synology doesn’t use btrfs in raid mode either. They put it on top of their LVM-based RAID instead.
  - doublepg23 4y ago
    I thought I heard that as well but I had another person disagree so I’m not sure who is right.
    - ianlevesque 4y ago
      They are mistaken. In Synology DSM you create a "pool" which is LVM-based under the hood, then inside the pool you can add btrfs & ext4 "volumes" that coexist inside the pool. They would need to let you create a btrfs pool instead if they were doing btrfs on bare drives.
Dalewyn 4y ago
Synology apparently thinks btrfs is reliable enough to bet their credibility on it, for what that's worth.

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.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  I've had corruption on a btrfs root partition somewhere between last year and only this year. It was in files I wasn't really using anymore (some ssh key files on vps that weren't online anymore) so I have no idea when it really occured.

LanternLight83 4y ago

It's really matured, and although the RAID5/6 Write Hole still exists, I wouldn't reccomend a ZDEV over RAID10 either, which is what I believe offers the best tradeoffs for most users on both filesystems. Love the flexibility that BTRFS provides via eg. the balance comand, and Snapper is great for snapshot management.

LukeShu 4y ago

IMO, it became stable somewhere between 2013 and 2016. I definitely haven't had any spontaneous corruption since at least 2016 (on multiple laptops and servers; btrfs volumes that mid-double-digit of terabytes) That said, - My BDB and SQLite databases tend to corrupt if my laptop battery dies and they're on a volume that's not on LUKS. - `btrfs check` (fsck), `btrfs rescue`, and `btrfs restore` are IMO not up to snuff if you do encounter corruption (caused by something else, like a failing drive). (But I'm working on that https://git.lukeshu.com/btrfs-progs-ng/ https://git.lukeshu.com/btrfs-progs-ng/ !) - `docker build` is weirdly slow on btrfs, I always set up a separate ext4 `/var/lib/docker` volume. - I do RAID and encryption separately in MD or LVM and LUKS, so no comments from me about the stability of btrfs' built-in RAID cor encryption.

Slix 4y ago
> `docker build` is weirdly slow on btrfs, I always set up a separate ext4 `/var/lib/docker` volume. I'm currently doing this for a different reason. My docker builds started failing after some Ubuntu upgrade. I gave up and used ext4 for that docker directory to fix everything. https://serverfault.com/q/1127148 https://serverfault.com/q/1127148 It unsettled me because now I'm not sure whether btrfs (or docker with btrfs) is production-ready.
- LukeShu 4y ago
  Docker has 8 different storage drivers that it can use... that's a lot, so you know they don't all get equal attention. As much as I love btrfs, it's probably fair to say that the only Docker storage driver that receives adequate attention to be production-ready is "overlay2". https://docs.docker.com/storage/storagedriver/select-storage-driver/ https://docs.docker.com/storage/storagedriver/select-storage...
jdhendrickson 4y ago
Any ideas on what causes the docker issue? Or have you not poked it with a stick yet?
- 4y ago

nailer 4y ago

File systems are drivers and user space software shouldn’t really see the difference.

flatiron 4y ago
There is no way to have btrfs caps insensitive. So some software (poorly coded) could have capitalization issues that would not appear in NTFS that would in btrfs. But other than that I believe you are right (barring utilities specifically designed to interact with FS attributes)
- ElectricalUnion 4y ago
  > There is no way to have btrfs caps insensitive. There is no way to make NTFS case insensitive either, it being case insensitive in Windows is a Windows implementation detail.
  - nailer 4y ago
    Does that mean windows could make any file system case insensitive?
    - ElectricalUnion 4y ago
      Any OS can "make a filesystem case insensitive"; for example in Linux you can do it if your kernel has support for it[1]. But again, that is a OS implementation detail thing, the underlying file system is still case preserving. [1] https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2020/08/27/using-the-linux-kernel-case-insensitive-feature-in-ext4/ https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2020/08/27/usin...
- magicalhippo 4y ago
  I've been running my Samba shares case sensitive for over a decade, only issue I've found is I can't rename "Foo" to "foo" without jumping through an extra hoop (add a letter or similar). Perhaps if I ran some software off it I might find some more issues but, overall quite little. The difference in speed is immense though.

yyyk 4y ago

Well, there's ReFS as well. That experience suggests there are issues that the author might come up against following boot: Case insensitive lookup (NTFS has the option for case sensitive subdirectories but that probably doesn't matter), Mark of the Web/SQL Server (Alternate data streams support), UWP/Microsoft Store apps support (IIRC requires FS encryption support via a specific interface), DLT (Object IDs), getting DISM to work for updates... It's cool to get this far, full support will probably need a bit more work.

pxc 4y ago

There's a ZFS port for Windows but I don't think using it on the boot volume is supported. You could definitely try it, though!

doublepg23 4y ago

I enjoy it as ext4++. Would I trust it for RAID? Not particularly. There seems to be a decent amount of foot-guns still and I would greatly prefer just using ZFS. Granted, I do trust Synology using btrfs but they are also subject matter experts on the topic.

ianlevesque 4y ago
Synology doesn’t use btrfs in raid mode either. They put it on top of their LVM-based RAID instead.
- doublepg23 4y ago
  I thought I heard that as well but I had another person disagree so I’m not sure who is right.
  - ianlevesque 4y ago
    They are mistaken. In Synology DSM you create a "pool" which is LVM-based under the hood, then inside the pool you can add btrfs & ext4 "volumes" that coexist inside the pool. They would need to let you create a btrfs pool instead if they were doing btrfs on bare drives.

Dalewyn 4y ago

Synology apparently thinks btrfs is reliable enough to bet their credibility on it, for what that's worth.