Btrfs For Linux 4.3 Has TRIM & RAID 5/6 Fixes

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Btrfs For Linux 4.3 Has TRIM & RAID 5/6 Fixes

While the F2FS and EXT4 updates for Linux 4.3 weren't too meaty, there's a bit more going on in the Btrfs camp...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Btrfs-For-Linux-4.3

[DonQ]

Btrfs may be ready for prime-time but it is not ready for me. I've been using Linux since around '98 and I just had the worst file corruption ever. Locked up the system when I did a btrf scrub. Good thing it was only my Steam drive although I guess I lost my Torchlight 2 saved games. It was not SSD. EXT4 seems to be working fine on the same drive.

[liam]

Btrfs may be ready for prime-time but it is not ready for me. I've been using Linux since around '98 and I just had the worst file corruption ever. Locked up the system when I did a btrf scrub. Good thing it was only my Steam drive although I guess I lost my Torchlight 2 saved games. It was not SSD. EXT4 seems to be working fine on the same drive.

Can you reference the bug number, please? If like to avoid this if possible because I've been running btrfs for, roughly, four years and haven't experienced anything like this and would LOVE for that to continue.

[chrisq]

Can you reference the bug number, please? If like to avoid this if possible because I've been running btrfs for, roughly, four years and haven't experienced anything like this and would LOVE for that to continue.

Same.
I have 3 laptops and 3 computers that all have been running btrfs for at least 4 years.
Never lost a filesystem even though the laptops normally lose power at least a couple of times a week.
The worst problem I've had is having to zero the log a couple of times.

[DonQ]

Can you reference the bug number, please? If like to avoid this if possible because I've been running btrfs for, roughly, four years and haven't experienced anything like this and would LOVE for that to continue.

I cannot. I spent the better part of last weekend reading the documentation (check, scrub, etc.) and finally got tired and just reformmated the drive. I could run scrub off the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS but not 4.1 or 4.2rc8 in my systems, otherwise the whole system would lock up. btrfs check said the drive was fine and I could mount it but writing to it would fail. I still have more data in btrfs (1.5 TB) because I had converted all my drives to it after my last full system backup a few months ago. Yes, I know, bad user, bad, for not reporting problem.

[DonQ]

Phoronix swallowed my previous reply. Ha ha, maybe it's just my bad luck. No, I do not have number. After spending the better part of last weekend troubleshooting, reading the documentation, and trying different things (it takes a long time to boot off a CD) I gave up and reformmated ext4. I could run scrub off Ubuntu 14.04 LTS without the system locking up but I think the process crashed because it would say it was running but it never progress past 10 MB total bytes scrubbed and dmesg indicated there had been a problem which googling indicated there were probably bad sectors on the drive. I still have more data in btrfs ~ 1.75 TB everything but Steam, ~600 GB of Steam games in ext4.
Edit: more. after running btrfs check repair it would say drive was OK and I could mount it but writing to it would fail.

[PuckPoltergeist]

Phoronix swallowed my previous reply. Ha ha, maybe it's just my bad luck. No, I do not have number. After spending the better part of last weekend troubleshooting, reading the documentation, and trying different things (it takes a long time to boot off a CD) I gave up and reformmated ext4. I could run scrub off Ubuntu 14.04 LTS without the system locking up but I think the process crashed because it would say it was running but it never progress past 10 MB total bytes scrubbed and dmesg indicated there had been a problem which googling indicated there were probably bad sectors on the drive. I still have more data in btrfs ~ 1.75 TB everything but Steam, ~600 GB of Steam games in ext4.
Edit: more. after running btrfs check repair it would say drive was OK and I could mount it but writing to it would fail.

Without proper error report, it's hard to say what's going on. But this sounds like you really should check your hard disk for errors.

Last time I've run into troubles with btrfs was last year and because of a power failure. After this, I couldn't mount the device anymore because of "parent transid verify failed"-error. All SBs seemed to be affected. I was able to rescue all the data with the restore utility and afterwards fix the fs somehow. One SB copy was still correct and I've managed to work with this, IIRC. But it took me a whole day for this.

[renkin]

I've had a few spooky btrfs corruption issues before. It was in the early days of btrfs, so I was expecting it. Nobody could track down where the corruption was coming from though. It turns out that I had failing memory modules. I ran Gentoo at the time, and GCC always failed compiling. My laptop also failed memtest86+. I got my RAM replaced, and all was fine. I can't remember if my data was hosed though. I'm pretty sure Chris Mason wrote a patch for btrfsck to fix my specific problem.

[liam]

I cannot. I spent the better part of last weekend reading the documentation (check, scrub, etc.) and finally got tired and just reformmated the drive. I could run scrub off the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS but not 4.1 or 4.2rc8 in my systems, otherwise the whole system would lock up. btrfs check said the drive was fine and I could mount it but writing to it would fail. I still have more data in btrfs (1.5 TB) because I had converted all my drives to it after my last full system backup a few months ago. Yes, I know, bad user, bad, for not reporting problem.

That's unfortunate, sorry to hear about your disk issues.
In the future, if you have a spare drive you can pretty much always recover your data with btrfs. It's very conservative when it comes to errors, which it sounds like you had (BTW, were you running smartd and having it notify of problems?). Iirc, they've a mount option which helps with this (speaking of, did the drive remount itself ro?).