In my opinion, one of the coolest features of BTRFS is how it can integrate directly with Docker so the storage of images and volumes by the application is optimized via the filesystem.
Great video as always DJ! A hot tip for working with the btrfs command line utility, you can truncate the subcommands. So, 'btrfs su cr /srv/data' is equivalent to 'btrfs subvolume create /srv/data'. Makes sense to show the whole command in the video, so people know what you are doing, but makes working with it day to day a little bit nicer. Cheers!
A few years back, I tried BTRFS. Things worked fine until I started using Docker more and more.... One day, I ran out of drive space! Turns out BTRFS wasn't freeing up space when I deleted a container! At the time, this bug was a few years old (I never would have used BTRFS if I knew about it beforehand.). I backed up, reinstalled using EXT4 and haven't tried BTRFS since.
From Crucial's FAQ: "Defragmenting is not recommended for solid state drives. At best, it won't do anything to help get a faster SSD drive, at worst, it will use up write cycles. If you have already defragged your SSD a few times, it won’t harm your SSD. However, it’s not a practice you should continue.."
@@keyboardwarrior6296 The spinwrite guy has some further info on why/when to do a "refresh" of flash drives. You can "revive" them a little some times if they get a bit slow. Generally the rule of thumb is don't bother unless it's an old drive and even then don't unless you know what you are doing.
Have a BTRFS file system on my laptop, and most snapshots are stored within the disk itself, but need to export a backup to an external HD for recovery. Could you make a video about that in the future perhaps?
I use BTRFS with a weird raid5 setup of 6 drives of different sizes (1-2TB) and interfaces (SATA & NVME). I initially made it to test and mess around but after finding it to work well for me I started to use it as a main vm storage (that I back up). The only problems that I ever have is after an upgrade (not even of btrfs or kernel, unknown what really causes it), on the next reboot it might not mount the BTRFS. After a manual mount or a reboot all seems to work well. I might look at logs the next time it doesn't mount on boot and see what that says but it is an easy fix.
Running balance after defragmentation is said to duplicate reflinked or snapshotted files, so I just do a yearly scrub instead of defragmentation. Any thoughts?
Good video and I agree with you. Btfrs is nice for the desktop and a simple home server. I used it for some time with Fedora and some other systems. However in 2018 I started using ZOL (ZFS On Linux) and later OpenZFS. All my applications run in VMs, so my Fedora would run btrfs on top of OpenZFS and that is somewhat silly, so now all my VMs run on ext4 or ntfs. For my home use I don't remember any problems with ext4 nor with btrfs nor with OpenZFS. I prefer OpenZFS, for the following reasons: - More OSes support ZFS, so my ancient 2nd backup server (Pentium 4 HT; 32 bits!) did run FreeBSD on OpenZFS :) - OpenZFS has a high quality CLI design, it is very consistent and easy to use and remember. - The supported disk caches L1ARC (memory) and L2ARC (SSD). I limit the L1ARC to 8GB of 32GB and I use an old 128GB SSD (sata) as a cheap L2ARC cache for my HDD. L2ARC mainly helps with the boot speed of VMs stored on the HDD, afterwards that VM runs from the L1ARC. My VM's disk IO runs completely from lz4 compressed memory (L1ARC). E.g. the VM of Xubuntu 24.04 LTS boots in 4.5 secs from a nvme (3400/2300MB/s) supported by the L1ARC memory cache.
Should autodefrag flag be used on SSDs or only on spinning disks? I see a lot of comments against it for the former because of the performance issue and over time wear.
You say that you don't think btrfs is good for enterprise because it doesn't have raid5/6. However, btrfs has stable profiles that have redundancy: raid1 and raid10. Sure, raid1 doesn't have as good storage efficiency as raid5/6 can, but it is still redundancy.
In my opinion, one of the coolest features of BTRFS is how it can integrate directly with Docker so the storage of images and volumes by the application is optimized via the filesystem.
That's interesting, I wasn't aware of that. Something to research-cheers.
Great video as always DJ! A hot tip for working with the btrfs command line utility, you can truncate the subcommands. So, 'btrfs su cr /srv/data' is equivalent to 'btrfs subvolume create /srv/data'. Makes sense to show the whole command in the video, so people know what you are doing, but makes working with it day to day a little bit nicer. Cheers!
Thanks. I just started using BTRFS a few months ago, so this is good information.
A few years back, I tried BTRFS. Things worked fine until I started using Docker more and more.... One day, I ran out of drive space!
Turns out BTRFS wasn't freeing up space when I deleted a container! At the time, this bug was a few years old (I never would have used BTRFS if I knew about it beforehand.). I backed up, reinstalled using EXT4 and haven't tried BTRFS since.
Yes sir, performance tuning!
Performance tuning please. BTRFS users are "advanced" by default so a deep dive is needed. Thanks!
am i wrong or was it not bad to do defraging on ssd/nvme?
This is what I heard too.
From Crucial's FAQ:
"Defragmenting is not recommended for solid state drives. At best, it won't do anything to help get a faster SSD drive, at worst, it will use up write cycles. If you have already defragged your SSD a few times, it won’t harm your SSD. However, it’s not a practice you should continue.."
@@keyboardwarrior6296 The spinwrite guy has some further info on why/when to do a "refresh" of flash drives. You can "revive" them a little some times if they get a bit slow. Generally the rule of thumb is don't bother unless it's an old drive and even then don't unless you know what you are doing.
Have a BTRFS file system on my laptop, and most snapshots are stored within the disk itself, but need to export a backup to an external HD for recovery. Could you make a video about that in the future perhaps?
I don't see using it instead of zfs. I would love an in-depth video on it though. Absolutely love your content btw. Have for a long time now😊
I use BTRFS with a weird raid5 setup of 6 drives of different sizes (1-2TB) and interfaces (SATA & NVME). I initially made it to test and mess around but after finding it to work well for me I started to use it as a main vm storage (that I back up). The only problems that I ever have is after an upgrade (not even of btrfs or kernel, unknown what really causes it), on the next reboot it might not mount the BTRFS. After a manual mount or a reboot all seems to work well. I might look at logs the next time it doesn't mount on boot and see what that says but it is an easy fix.
Running balance after defragmentation is said to duplicate reflinked or snapshotted files, so I just do a yearly scrub instead of defragmentation. Any thoughts?
Good video and I agree with you. Btfrs is nice for the desktop and a simple home server. I used it for some time with Fedora and some other systems. However in 2018 I started using ZOL (ZFS On Linux) and later OpenZFS. All my applications run in VMs, so my Fedora would run btrfs on top of OpenZFS and that is somewhat silly, so now all my VMs run on ext4 or ntfs. For my home use I don't remember any problems with ext4 nor with btrfs nor with OpenZFS.
I prefer OpenZFS, for the following reasons:
- More OSes support ZFS, so my ancient 2nd backup server (Pentium 4 HT; 32 bits!) did run FreeBSD on OpenZFS :)
- OpenZFS has a high quality CLI design, it is very consistent and easy to use and remember.
- The supported disk caches L1ARC (memory) and L2ARC (SSD). I limit the L1ARC to 8GB of 32GB and I use an old 128GB SSD (sata) as a cheap L2ARC cache for my HDD. L2ARC mainly helps with the boot speed of VMs stored on the HDD, afterwards that VM runs from the L1ARC.
My VM's disk IO runs completely from lz4 compressed memory (L1ARC). E.g. the VM of Xubuntu 24.04 LTS boots in 4.5 secs from a nvme (3400/2300MB/s) supported by the L1ARC memory cache.
Performance tuning is exactly what is preventing me from using btrfs. My attempts to configure it failed and I couldn't figure out why.
I've being switched to lvm and LABELS in fstab years ago. Looks more manageable.
Should autodefrag flag be used on SSDs or only on spinning disks? I see a lot of comments against it for the former because of the performance issue and over time wear.
Performance tuning please.
Advanced performance tuning please.
You say that you don't think btrfs is good for enterprise because it doesn't have raid5/6. However, btrfs has stable profiles that have redundancy: raid1 and raid10. Sure, raid1 doesn't have as good storage efficiency as raid5/6 can, but it is still redundancy.
plus nobody runs 5/6 in real workloads anymore. but i would still use zfs on a backup nas, btfs is option hosting a container host or desktop