Windows on Btrfs • Hacker News Board

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#31

Post by solarkraft » Fri, Apr 21, 2023, 10:30 PM UTC

Arnavion wrote: post #22

curt15 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How stable is Btrfs these days? Remember reading years ago that it was bad about spontaneously corrupting itself for no apparent reason. On one hand, Fedora and SUSE default to Btrfs. On the other hand, data corruption bugs are still being unearthed [1]: [1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2169947 .

FWIW I've been using btrfs for the root partition for a decade without any (observed) corruption problems. This is across multiple installs of OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on laptops and PCs, HDDs and SSDs and most recently an SD card. Back in the day it needed manual intervention to rebalance but that is automated now. Also, OpenSUSE's update program automatically takes pre- and post- snapshots, and these snapshots have save…

Same here. Never had to do anything, with the notable exception of it being somewhat annoying to recover when the disk is full (which is why I've started to keep subvolumes that I can quickly delete).

But I'm not running a RAID, which I believe is where almost all of the data corruption has happened.

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#32

Post by yyyk » Fri, Apr 21, 2023, 10:31 PM UTC

kitsunesoba wrote: post #5

Interesting, I would've expected more Windows software to just assume NTFS with some fallbacks for (ex)fat given how there haven't really been any other options for quite some time. How stable is Btrfs these days? Remember reading years ago that it was bad about spontaneously corrupting itself for no apparent reason. Curious if something similar is possible with ZFS.

Well, there's ReFS as well. That experience suggests there are issues that the author might come up against following boot: Case insensitive lookup (NTFS has the option for case sensitive subdirectories but that probably doesn't matter), Mark of the Web/SQL Server (Alternate data streams support), UWP/Microsoft Store apps support (IIRC requires FS encryption support via a specific interface), DLT (Object IDs), getting DISM to work for updates... It's cool to get this far, full support will probably need a bit more work.

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#33

Post by HeckFeck » Fri, Apr 21, 2023, 10:34 PM UTC

skanga wrote: post #6

Can someone please explain the advantages of doing this?

Step one: Include Linux kernel in Windows.

Step two: Include Linux filesystem in Windows.

Step three: Windows is Linux.

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#34

Post by solarkraft » Fri, Apr 21, 2023, 10:34 PM UTC

garaetjjte wrote: post #20

kitsunesoba wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some amount of that might be coming from Windows Defender and similar, but yeah NTFS isn't exactly a speed demon.

Nothing particularly wrong with NTFS, it's Windows filesystem architecture that is slow.

I can't find it right now, but I believe there was a talk from a Rust maintainer a while ago about the Rust installation being way slower than it should be, which was almost entirely a rant on Windows file system performance.

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#35

Post by solarkraft » Fri, Apr 21, 2023, 10:37 PM UTC

Pretty cool, apart from the fact that it's Windows you're booting.

But what's up with UWP apps not working?

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#36

Post by EvanAnderson » Fri, Apr 21, 2023, 10:38 PM UTC

This is really cool and speaks to the modularity of the Windows file system stack. I love projects that customize Windows (working against its closed-source nature).

There’s an OpenZFS port to Windows[0]. I wonder if my hopes of having ZFS on Windows (including the boot drive, because I would love to be able to snapshot and rollback) would actually be possible.

[0] https://github.com/openzfsonwindows/openzfs

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#37

Post by pxc » Fri, Apr 21, 2023, 10:40 PM UTC

kitsunesoba wrote: post #5

Interesting, I would've expected more Windows software to just assume NTFS with some fallbacks for (ex)fat given how there haven't really been any other options for quite some time. How stable is Btrfs these days? Remember reading years ago that it was bad about spontaneously corrupting itself for no apparent reason. Curious if something similar is possible with ZFS.

There's a ZFS port for Windows but I don't think using it on the boot volume is supported. You could definitely try it, though!

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#38

Post by solarkraft » Fri, Apr 21, 2023, 10:40 PM UTC

skanga wrote: post #6

Can someone please explain the advantages of doing this?

Less Microsoft-centric stuff on your computer.

btrfs is pretty comfortable to manage, too.

On that point: I wonder how the subvolume experience is.

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#39

Post by ygra » Fri, Apr 21, 2023, 10:41 PM UTC

solarkraft wrote: post #34

garaetjjte wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing particularly wrong with NTFS, it's Windows filesystem architecture that is slow.

I can't find it right now, but I believe there was a talk from a Rust maintainer a while ago about the Rust installation being way slower than it should be, which was almost entirely a rant on Windows file system performance.

That one perhaps? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbKGw8MQ0i8

I don't recall it particularly ranty, though.

Re: Windows on Btrfs

#40

Post by seiferteric » Fri, Apr 21, 2023, 10:41 PM UTC

skanga wrote: post #6

Can someone please explain the advantages of doing this?

Actually I have been looking for just this for several years, even as recently as a few weeks ago I was looking, but only found some commercial btrfs driver. The idea of unified storage is really nice, you don't have to decide how much each OS gets, and with btrfs you can just plop in another drive and extend onto it to transparently increase storage capacity. On top of that, tings like duplicating steam game assets would probably be a big win.