• Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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    1 month ago

    What’s the problem with btrfs really?

    It is nice but it also feels like it is perpetually unfinished. Is there some major flaw in the design?

    • enumerator4829@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      I’ve seen ZFS in production use on pools with hundreds of TBs, clustered together into clusters of many PBs. The people running that don’t even think about BTRFS, and certainly won’t actively consider it for anything.

      • BTRFS once had data corruption bugs. ZFS also had that, but only in very specific edge cases. That case was taken very seriously, but basically, ZFS has a reputation for not fucking up your bits even close to BTRFS
      • ZFS was built and tested for use on large pools from the beginning, by Sun engineers from back when Sun was fucking amazing and not a pile of Oracle managed garbage. BTRFS still doesn’t have stable RAID5/6.
      • ZFS send/recv is amazing for remote replication of large filesystems.
      • DRAID is kind o the only sane thing to do with todays disk sizes, speeds and pool sizes.

      But those are ancillary reasons. I’ll quote the big reason from the archwiki:

      The RAID 5 and RAID 6 modes of Btrfs are fatally flawed, and should not be used for "anything but testing with throw-away data”.

      For economic reasons, you need erasure coding for bigger pools, either classic RAID5/6 or DRAID. BTRFS will either melt your data in RAID5/6 or not support DRAID at all.

    • swab148@lemm.ee
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      1 month ago

      Mostly just the RAID5 and 6 instability, it’s fantastic otherwise. But I’m kinda excited to try out bcachefs pretty soon, as well.

          • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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            1 month ago

            The Linux kernel uses mailing lists so technically it is called a patch.

            I think the biggest issue was that Kent had/has a attitude problem. It feels weird to pick a fight with Torvalds since he is kind of known for destroying devs but Kent did it anyway.

        • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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          1 month ago

          Honestly, if it’s important enough to RAID, it’s important enough to do right and run full fat ZFS.

          You could also go the mdadm route with individual disks but ZFS pools are so battle-tested that whatever unholy edgecase you manage to create will almost certainly be something someone has encountered before, and it’s probably well documented somewhere how to recover from

    • blackstrat@lemmy.fwgx.uk
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      1 month ago

      The main one is how it handles corruption. It has actively been designed to do the exact opposite of what a sane filesystem should do and maximises downtime.

  • circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 month ago

    The CoW nature of Btrfs means it’s often slower than ext4 for common tasks, right? It also means more writes to your SSDs.

    I’ve stuck to ext4 so far, as someone who doesn’t really have a need for snapshotting.

    Edit: I’m not an expert on file systems in the least, so do chime in if these assumptions are incorrect.

      • circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 month ago

        But if the file system needs extra writes anyway for CoW, and the SSD needs its own CoW, then wouldn’t that end up being exponential writes? Or is there some mechanism which mitigates that?

  • JonnyRobbie@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    what’s the advantage of raid 5&6 over something like raid 4&5 - it reads essentially the same to me - a parity redundancy.

    • InverseParallax@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      4 is bad because parity is on one drive so no matter what happens that drive is the write bottleneck. Raid5 is basically raid4 + raid0.

      5 is just fine but low safety, I run 6 always and it has basically never let me down.

  • AnimalsDream@slrpnk.net
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    1 month ago

    I wish we could just get one good open, unified filesystem that all OS’s support. It sucks that if I want a usb drive to function on both Android and Linux, I have to format it to FAT. That pos fs can’t even store files over 4 gigs.

    I normally prefer copyleft licenses, but this is one case something more permissive seems appropriate.

    • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
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      1 month ago

      Honest question: I thought this limitation was the purpose of exFAT? 🤔

      I don’t use it much myself though so I’m not sure.

      • AnimalsDream@slrpnk.net
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        1 month ago

        Maybe? All I know is the other day I used my Debian pc (gnome) to format a usb drive as fat, thinking that’d be the most compatible and hassle free fs for storing and transferring files. Then I got an error that I couldn’t store Champions of Norrath on it because it couldn’t store files over 4 gigs. So for now I just am using ext4.

  • lunarul@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    I zoomed in to read what they’re saying on the bottom right and was disappointed.

        • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works
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          1 month ago

          it doesn’t snap like a pro, though. I’m not a windows fan, but the NTFS snapshotting tech, the Volume Shadowcopy service on windows, notifies databases and whatever that is subscribed to it so that they can finish writing whatever is in the pipeline, and receive feedback from writers when they are done to know when to proceed.

          as I know, linux does not have such a mechanism. without it restoring a snapshot made on a running system is exactly like booting from a crash.

          sure better than nothing. but it’s not like a pro.

    • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      mergerfs in the kernel would be cool for better performance.

      for those that don’t know, it’s a FUSE based filesystem, which is also cool, but can be slow at times.

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    IDK what they mean by better ssd I/O performance, btrfs was the worst FS I tested for some heavy SSD workloads (like writing thousands of little pngs in short time, file searches, merging huge weights with some paging)…

    The features are fantastic, especially for HDDs, but it’s an inherently high overhead FS.

    ext4 was also bad. F2FS and XFS are great, and I’ve stuck with F2FS for now.