Testing Out The Btrfs Mount Options On Linux 3.2

[DanL]

Why this focus on speed? Why not focus on data safety?

Reliability should be a given for a filesystem.

[kebabbert]

OK, so let's talk reliability. As it stands, BTRFS is much more prone to corruption and gradual degradation of speed and even available free spance than EXT4. Just look at all the reports of people saying BTRFS becomes unusable after a a few days of running. The fact is that for the vast majority of desktop users, BTRFS still has no advantage over EXT4.

Now this is a VERY good argument to use EXT4 over BTRFS! Why does no one say this except Stan?

Heck, I can make an unsafe fast solution that no one can trust. The difficulty is making it stable and safe - and yes, that will become a bit slower but some might consider that worth the price. If what Stan says is true, then everybody should prefer EXT4 over BTRFS?

[gilboa]

(@kebabbert)

... Because btrfs is far too immature to actually live up to the its potential reliability benefits.

Sure, I'd love to have ZFS-like-features on Linux, but for now, ext4 is more reliable than btrfs.

[Dinguz]

I'm not sure the 'inode_cache' option has been tested the right way, and the article doesn't describe in detail how this was done.

This option does some FS modifications on first boot, so in order to test, it is probably best to boot once with this option in effect, do some work, reboot, and only then run the tests.

[kebabbert]

Reliability should be a given for a filesystem.

Well, fact is, that reliability is not given for any filesystem. Apparently, there are many reports of BTRFS corrupting data. Here is one of the reports from last month:
http://phoronix.com/forums/showthrea...731#post249731

[evolution]

Well, I saw the results and I've a weird question to ask about them: Why using compression gives so much better performance than not using compression at all? Shouldn't it be the opposite? It seems something very wrong is on the results that use BTRFS compression, btw...

Also, these results only confirm why at the moment ext4 is the defacto file system for Linux consumer users. But I hope BTRFS will get better over time...

Cheers

[rrohbeck]

OK, so let's talk reliability. As it stands, BTRFS is much more prone to corruption and gradual degradation of speed and even available free spance than EXT4. Just look at all the reports of people saying BTRFS becomes unusable after a a few days of running. The fact is that for the vast majority of desktop users, BTRFS still has no advantage over EXT4.

I've been using Btrfs heavily since October, with a 4x 3TB RAID 10. Frequent creation/snapshotting/deletion of subvolumes for sandboxes that often go up to 140GB and a bunch of VMs (you want chattr -c and -C for VMs, otherwise they're slow.) I also had a few crashes and power failures. Oh and the whole thing runs on top of Flashcache.
Zero problems.

[Kamikaze]

I've been using Btrfs heavily since October, with a 4x 3TB RAID 10. Frequent creation/snapshotting/deletion of subvolumes for sandboxes that often go up to 140GB and a bunch of VMs (you want chattr -c and -C for VMs, otherwise they're slow.) I also had a few crashes and power failures. Oh and the whole thing runs on top of Flashcache.
Zero problems.

+1

I've also been using btrfs roughly since October for my main /home/ partition on my (frequently used) laptop. Never had a problem with the FS, and I've managed to run the laptop out of battery a couple of times, although I'm not using any of it's features yet.

[gilboa]

@Kamikaze and rrohbeck:

I'm not trying to mock your personal experience, far from it.
But please keep in mind that when it comes to file system corruption, "WORKS-FOR-ME" reports carry *far* less weight than corruption reports - even if only 1/1000 suffers from a catastrophic report. (And by looking at the Fedora bugzilla, btrfs has yet to reach 1/1000 level)

- Gilboa

[BenderRodriguez]

@Kamikaze and rrohbeck:

I'm not trying to mock your personal experience, far from it.
But please keep in mind that when it comes to file system corruption, "WORKS-FOR-ME" reports carry *far* less weight than corruption reports - even if only 1/1000 suffers from a catastrophic report. (And by looking at the Fedora bugzilla, btrfs has yet to reach 1/1000 level)

- Gilboa

+1 This. Using BTRFS on my main / (Gentoo) without any problems and i already had some power blackouts and no corruption for now. I guess everyone has already forgotten how ext4 was eating data and BTRFS is safer than ext4 without crippling performance too much and has a lot more useful features as well. All i say is that if BTRFS is at least 2/3 as fast as ext4 i will choose it any day.