Btrfs File-System For Old Computers?

[deanjo]

So what kind of risks are you facing if using the "nobarrier" option?

Data loss.

[oliver]

Unacceptable I guess.

Even the most redundant raid6 super battery backed up with UPS, you can still have a kernel panic or some other crash. Unless you have decent backups, that can get you backup fast, nobarrier seems like a non-option to me imo.

[drag]

It depends on what you want. For some people running 'noatime' is unacceptable because the atime is data that is valuable for their specific purpose.

Btrfs is going to be a bit slower then Ext4 generally. Ext4 is a very fast FS, despite what the naysayers think. Especially when it comes to pure database purposes... the database uses directio which is something ext4 can be fantastic at...

That being said due to the features and extra levels of protection btrfs can offer then it's probably worth it to use it in the future. When btrfsck comes out then I will start taking btrfs more seriously.

[devius]

Got to dust off my trustworthy 486DX2-66 to see what a really old computer can do
It would be nice to see some real world tests done by a human, like time to compress a file(s), boot time, application start-up time... you know, stuff that actually matters.

[Kano]

btrfs with default settings and 3.0.x kernel is even a joke with an intel i7. all i wanted to do was to create a new image using debian live. that was so extremely slow that i wiped out the partition after the time which would usally be enough to create an image but it was still creating the chroot with btrfs. ext4 is the way to go as long as the defaults are so stupid. its funny that the only option that gives reasonal speed in that benchmark is the least recommended one, did not try it however yet.

[ciplogic]

Got to dust off my trustworthy 486DX2-66 to see what a really old computer can do
It would be nice to see some real world tests done by a human, like time to compress a file(s), boot time, application start-up time... you know, stuff that actually matters.

With DX2 you could run just DOS and Windows 95, Windows 98 will not run if you don't have at least 16 M of RAM, and NT 4 will not run without 24 M of RAM.
You're right about what should be counted as real stuff. Did you noticed: "auto-defrag" behaved bad, because auto-defrag is the way it is used today for a desktop system. Why it was not a fragmenter test done before to simulate disk usage!
But in the last time did you noticed a relevant benchmark so far running here? Made by a good methodology? Not being either spectacular journalism, like showing off a new hardware feature (like OpenGL 3.0 in a benchamark based on a driver support) or a software feature (adding LLVM to Mono could speedup in some benchmarks), either too deep in what results means.

[deanjo]

Windows 98 will not run if you don't have at least 16 M of RAM,

It would run on 8 megs if you used the /nm install option.

[Kivada]

Does the PowerMac G4 push OS X?
I learned something new!
I believed it worked only on x86 machines. I've never been a mac user and Wikipedia busted my false belief
--> it worked on it until Leopard 10.5 wow

any mac user can tell whether it chokes the hardware, or is it responsive? Leopard on a G4, I mean

Depends on the version, 10.4 runs allot better then 10.5 does, can't justify upgrading the CPU from a single "Apollo 6" 7455/G4e 800Mhz to a dual CPU "Apollo 8" 7448 1.8Ghz(not dual core, 2x CPU on a daughter card), and flash a PC ATI FireGL X3 AGP with the ROM off a Mac X800XT. Could go with a 7800GS AGP with the rom off a Mac Nvidia 7800GT, but since the only GPU drivers for PPC Macs are the OSS ones the X800 will run much better under Linux then the 7800.

I have more issues with more modern software that is poorly ported, though you get a few gems like the unofficial port of Firefox, TenFourFox, which has builds for several PowerPC CPUs.

[DeepDayze]

A core2duo isn't old! Now a 4500 (or was it 4200?) RPM ide laptopdrive, now that is old!

(Typing this from a T42 with a ide disk)

I'm a little bummed that the most important 'safety' option has such a huge impact on performance Hopefully this will be fixed soon, as I'm going to be using this laptop for hopefully 2-3 more years.

I have the same exact Thinkpad as well with a 60GB disk and 2GB RAM and a very dependable machine I'd also like to keep for a few more years so its good to see btrfs would be at least fairly usable on a machine like this one and hopefully the right optimizations can be found for a machine of this caliber so that btrfs can be a better FS

[crazycheese]

It would run on 8 megs if you used the /nm install option.

If 30 real-time minutes are acceptable. I remember quite good how 486sx with 4mb of ram started warcraft 2 with min requirement of 8mb ram overcome via running w3.1 with swapping. Dos4gw swapping didn't work at all.