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Btrfs Getting RAID 5/6 Fixes In Linux 4.12 Kernel

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  • Btrfs Getting RAID 5/6 Fixes In Linux 4.12 Kernel

    Phoronix: Btrfs Getting RAID 5/6 Fixes In Linux 4.12 Kernel

    Not only is the BFQ I/O scheduler coming for mainline Linux 4.12 but there are also some more fixes to Btrfs for improving the file-system's native handling of RAID5 and RAID6 modes...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    Is anyone using BTRFS in production? How are the experiences?

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    • #3
      Facebook using it for one-disk use-cases since 2014. RHEL and Oracle Linux ship with btrfs support. SLES install on btrfs by default. Btrfs used in Jolla phones and tablets. Synology and NetGear using it in NAS:
      The next-generation file system Btrfs ensures a high level of data integrity while taking advantage of flexible, efficient data protection and recovery tools. Btrfs is available on selected Synology NAS models.

      https://www.netgear.com/images/BTRFS...1318-76105.pdf

      Maybe there is something else I forgot about.
      Last edited by RussianNeuroMancer; 23 April 2017, 08:15 AM.

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      • #4
        Originally posted by Steffo View Post
        Is anyone using BTRFS in production? How are the experiences?
        I use it for all my personal workstations with compress=lzo and such, since some months even with luks whole-disk encryption, …
        #Unboxing and first impressions of an #Dell #XPS13 9360 Developer Edition with Linux. #Ad Dell XPS & more @Amazon: http://services.exactcode.de/amzn.cgi?inde...

        The only problem I encountered were some FS damage after mourning external SSD on a big-endian PPC while it was otherwise only used on x86 systems. I noticed btrfs IRC, but got no response, ... guess everyone is on x86, or otherwise little endian now anyways.

        Will probably start to move some light web servers et al. over to btrfs compress=lzo soon, too.

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        • #5
          Originally posted by Steffo View Post
          Is anyone using BTRFS in production? How are the experiences?
          I currently use it on all my daily drivers. No servers though.
          The COW snapshots feature is just too awesome to ignore. Don't use Raid56 yet. It's unstable but is definitely being worked on like Michael said. The qgroups code is definitely getting better, but still has a few issues. Another place where you might run into trouble is using a huge load of the stable features at once. For instance, deduplication on compressed data while running a scrub, all on top of raid 1. There's definitely corner cases here.

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          • #6
            Does anyone using btrfs on desktop? I'm thinking about using it on my primary desktop (snapshots - great feature), but I'm a bit worried about my datas. Does btrfs is safe to use today?

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            • #7
              Have been using btrfs with compression sans raid on two desktop systems (PC with SSD, Notebook with SSD) and media server (microsd + external hdd) for quite some time and mostly had no troubles with it. The snapshot feature in combination with COW is really nice, i did for example snapshot my current running system and systemd-nspawned into it to try out some stuff.

              I did run into unrepairable trouble on the external HDD of the media server probably related to some crashes. At some point i gave up and just formatted the whole drive.

              Also transmission and btrfs COW feature do not play along nicely, resulting in transmission telling you that the file is corrupt and even verifying and re-downloading the corrupt parts results still in corrupt files. The only solution is to disable COW for the folders you are downloading with transmission to.

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              • #8
                Originally posted by dragon321 View Post
                Does anyone using btrfs on desktop? I'm thinking about using it on my primary desktop (snapshots - great feature), but I'm a bit worried about my datas. Does btrfs is safe to use today?
                I'm a former everyday btrfs user. The main reason I started using btrfs was that compress=lzo seemed useful to decrease wear and tear on my SSD's. Why I switched to XFS after two years is mainly because of this irritating bug: http://marc.merlins.org/perso/btrfs/...-Problems.html

                The bug still hasn't been fixed and it required me to waste time 1-2 times per month running the workaround described on the website I linked above. I didn't suffer any dataloss nor any unrecoverable errors of any kind, though I used it on a single disk and never in any RAID mode.

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                • #9
                  I also use btrfs in RAID1 on my desktop and on my laptop (RAID1 with 2 partitions on the same drive for the laptop). Only issue I've encountered is that Virtualbox VMs choke if stored in btrfs, but this is well-known anyway, either disable COW for their folder or keep them somewhere else.

                  Heavy user of deduplication, I have tons of copies of the same projects with small modifications, without deduplication I would need a far bigger drive.

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by Steffo View Post
                    Is anyone using BTRFS in production? How are the experiences?
                    While not a "professional" production system we use BTRFS on Debian Stretch for our SOASC= / SOAMC= projects. This is mostly read on 6 disks set up as RAID1 (data+metadata). No problems yet, but as you can guess by the results of the filesystem tests done here at Phoronix it is not always the fastest filesystem. For us ensuring that the data is not accidentally corrupted by dodgy disks is far more important so that is why we go for BTRFS.

                    For my own machines I have been using BTRFS as a scratch disk (no redundancy) for some years. I have now recently moved my main desktop (including the root filesystem) to a 5 disk BTRFS RAID1 (data+metadata) array. It has been chewing along quite nicely and I only use features marked as stable / ok here https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Status

                    I have also played around a bit with BTRFS and especially the RAID1 mode on a USB array of 10x8GB usb sticks. I have on purpose corrupted data and btrfs always seems to clean up the problems quite nicely as long as you have at least 3 devices in the RAID1 array. The RAID5/6 mode is a piece of junk and it will corrupt AND crash your system quite quickly. Last time I tested was with kernel 4.7.

                    So if you are a bit like me and are completely paranoid when it comes to data integrity and wanna stay on the safe side here is my advice if you want to have a redundant setup that should allow you to sleep well at night.

                    1. Stay with RAID1 mode only.
                    2. Have at least 3x disks available. You need at least two working devices always or else BTRFS could get stuck in read only mode forever!
                    3. Avoid using compression, autodefrag, snapshots and/or lots of subvolumes
                    4. Keep an eye on the output of "btrfs filesystem usage -T /mountpoint" and rebalance if the unallocated count is low on any of the devices
                    5. Keep an eye on the output of "btrfs device status /mountpoint" if you have read/write and/or corruption errors.
                    6. As with all filesystems have recent, tested, working backups!
                    7. Keep an eye on the status page and mailing list and stay on a LTS kernel unless there are strong reasons to upgrade.


                    http://www.dirtcellar.net

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