Send/Receive Support For Btrfs Published

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Send/Receive Support For Btrfs Published

Experimental patches were published this week for the Btrfs file-system for "send/receive" support, which requires changes to btrfs-progs and the Btrfs kernel module that allow for creating a stream of instructions that can be replayed later...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTEzNDM

[Tiger_Coder]

I make my home partition BTRFS when installing Ubuntu 11.04(later updated to 11.10). After 2-3 months my system becomes too slow whenever its read data from home, specially Chrome took 1.5 min to open. Also some strange warning massage when starting Linux. Since I install 12.04 and make my home drive EXT4 again(also keep all the former data from previous home partition, my pc becomes much more faster, Chrome now take 5s(I keep all files from old home directory so Chrome still take same/more data while starting). I am all done with BTRFS and not going to use it for at least next 2 years.

[GreatEmerald]

I have been using Btrfs since openSUSE 11.4 and have yet to have any issues with it. Quite the opposite, even, as the snapshot utility has been extremely useful several times already.

[3vi1]

I was setting up a Linux partition on a multiboot system the other day, and went with btrfs. Then, when playing with grub and the hidden boot options (I didn't want the menu to appear unless shift was held), I somehow managed to get the system hosed up such that it booted the default (not Linux) OS and shift/esc would *not* interrupt/unhide GRUB for some reason.

So, "simple enough" I thought... I would just boot from a liveCD, chroot into the installed partition, fix /etc/default/grub and re-run update-grub - right?

That's where the real problem started: Have you tried to chroot into a root-level btrfs partition? I tried all kinds of things from two different live distros (including the install media I had originally used), and *never* could get it to work.

I ended up re-installing the partition from scratch as EXT4. I then managed to get into almost the exact same GRUB problem (this time after I manually edited /etc/grub.d/00_* to try to work around the original issue), but was able to chroot to the EXT4 partition to fix it with no difficulty whatsoever (so I know that what I was originally doing with btrfs was valid - it just won't work with that file system).

Long story short - I'm still wary of btrfs and only use/test it for auxiliary partitions that I really don't care about or that have reliable backups.

[geearf]

I have been using btrfs and chroot for a while, I don't see any issue there.

[ryao]

ZFS has had send/receive for years.

[GreatEmerald]

That's where the real problem started: Have you tried to chroot into a root-level btrfs partition? I tried all kinds of things from two different live distros (including the install media I had originally used), and *never* could get it to work.

I have always used EXT2 on a separate /boot partition. There is no reason not to.

[benmoran]

I've decided to test btrfs again on my work machine. I went full-on btrfs, with no seperate boot, mostly to see what will happen. The snapshot functionality works really well already, as does the transparent lzo compression. The only issue I'm having with it is slow updates due to the dpkg/flush issue, which seems to be unresolved due to polical rather than technical reasons.. I played around with the current raid 0/1 support, which works well. I'm looking forward to RAID 5/6 support, which will finally put it on par functionality wise with ZFS (for my uses).

It's pretty damn impressive considering the time it's been in development. Hopefully more widespread use will help get some of the remaining show stopping bugs squashed.

[ryao]

I've decided to test btrfs again on my work machine. I went full-on btrfs, with no seperate boot, mostly to see what will happen. The snapshot functionality works really well already, as does the transparent lzo compression. The only issue I'm having with it is slow updates due to the dpkg/flush issue, which seems to be unresolved due to polical rather than technical reasons.. I played around with the current raid 0/1 support, which works well. I'm looking forward to RAID 5/6 support, which will finally put it on par functionality wise with ZFS (for my uses).

It's pretty damn impressive considering the time it's been in development. Hopefully more widespread use will help get some of the remaining show stopping bugs squashed.

ZFS has plenty of features that btrfs lacks, such as zvols, support for swap, the ability to use SSDs to do write sequentialization, incremental send/receive and others. I would not call btrfs on par functionality-wise with ZFS. However, I would say that btrfs has the largest implemented subset of ZFS' features of any alternative filesystem.

[benmoran]

Yes, it's still lacking quite a few of the features that ZFS has, but I did say "for my uses".
It seems like they're working on the most widely used features first, which is good, but hopefully they add more of the niche features that some people have come to rely on. Now that you mention swap, that is definitely something I'd like to have. I sometimes like swap files over swap partitions.

One btrfs feature that I'm excited about is online shrinking of filesystems. This will definitely be of use to us.
The last I checked, you couldn't shrink online zpools on ZFS.