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Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?

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Re: Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?

#61

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

stametseater wrote: post #30
znpy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i had many friends who were very vocal about btrfs. most of them lost their data at one point, with btrfs, due to data corruption.

I've only heard of BTRFS corrupting data in RAID configurations, but for a single disk laptop setup it seems perfect to me. Automatic snapshotting has already saved my ass several times.

If we're trading anecdotes, I managed to lose 2 root filesystems to BTRFS, on a laptop with a single drive, on OpenSUSE (which has been using BTRFS by default for ages, i.e. the one place I expected it to be the most stable). I think it was some problem triggered by filling the filesystem, because that system had too small of a root FS and snapshots piled up too fast, but I don't know for sure what happened, only that I couldn't find a way to recover it short of wiping root and reinstalling (thankfully, I had a separate home so that was actually okay). And to answer the obvious question, I don't know that it wasn't a hardware problem, but the home FS on the same machine, also on BTRFS, never gave me any problems, and honestly if the filesystem's reaction to a hardware error is to hose the whole filesystem that's still a hard pass from me.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?

#62

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #37
nubinetwork wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone can afford a dedicated NAS/file server.

No one designing defaults for a home distro will tune it for the server use case by default, so raid 5 considerations are totally irrelevant to OP's question.

What do defaults have to do with it? Like, sure, if I use a desktop spin of Ubuntu on a NAS I expect performance to be worse, but I don't expect it to lose my data. That's not a bad default, that's bad code.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?

#63

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

ianai wrote: post #39

My question is why in 2023 isn’t there some better efforts to at least bring third party support for the various FSes to the various OSes? Or is it a side effect of streaming everything? Ie who cares. Ie file systems are solved tech and nothing really new until permanent storage is as fast as RAM in all aspects, replaces it, and we get some new computing paradigm.

> My question is why in 2023 isn’t there some better efforts to at least bring third party support for the various FSes to the various OSes?

From the FS rather than the OS side, but I feel like support is pretty good?

ZFS supports all the big ones and many smaller options - Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, illumos (albeit with some slight incompatibilities depending on enabled features). The only OS that I kind of miss it on is OpenBSD.

BTRFS is, I grant, behind in this aspect, but it still has Windows and Linux, which is... a start, at least.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?

#64

Post by rhn_mk1 »

MacsHeadroom wrote: post #54
rhn_mk1 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unnoticeable when you don't reevaluate your choices. Once you get into the habit of automatic snapshots, ext4's lack of snapshotting is very noticeable.

I'm not GP, but I'm curious. What am I missing out on? When would I benefit from having a snapshot on say my laptop?

One thing the sibling did not mention is you can use btrfs send/receive to create dead easy, fast, and simple to restore incremental backups.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?

#65

Post by rhn_mk1 »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #62
rhn_mk1 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one designing defaults for a home distro will tune it for the server use case by default, so raid 5 considerations are totally irrelevant to OP's question.

What do defaults have to do with it? Like, sure, if I use a desktop spin of Ubuntu on a NAS I expect performance to be worse, but I don't expect it to lose my data . That's not a bad default, that's bad code.

OP's question:

"Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?"

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?

#66

Post by _piif »

MacsHeadroom wrote: post #54
rhn_mk1 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unnoticeable when you don't reevaluate your choices. Once you get into the habit of automatic snapshots, ext4's lack of snapshotting is very noticeable.

I'm not GP, but I'm curious. What am I missing out on? When would I benefit from having a snapshot on say my laptop?

I've lost track of the amount of times I accidentally deleted a file I shouldn't have or messed up a git project in a way it'd have taken ages to untangle, said oops, remembered I have hourly snapper snapshots set up and just copied the previous state over. It's been a massive time- and occasionally lifesaver for me.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?

#67

Post by graypegg »

_piif wrote: post #66
MacsHeadroom wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not GP, but I'm curious. What am I missing out on? When would I benefit from having a snapshot on say my laptop?

I've lost track of the amount of times I accidentally deleted a file I shouldn't have or messed up a git project in a way it'd have taken ages to untangle, said oops, remembered I have hourly snapper snapshots set up and just copied the previous state over. It's been a massive time- and occasionally lifesaver for me.

You know, that's very convincing actually! I'm obviously missing out, I'll need to mess around with it more.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?

#68

Post by nubinetwork »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #60
guardiangod wrote: post #33

I am using both. I've lost data on both, and near misses that required hair-raising metadata rebuild. BTRFS documentation still greatly trail behind ZFS, imo. It's RAID1 implementation is subpar in terms of monitoring.

> I've lost data on both Can I ask about the circumstances of losing data on ZFS? I've been viewing it as 100% rock-solid, so I'd very much like to know about any failure modes I'm missing.

I know of two instances, but they were short lived. One revolved around hole_birth, and the other around reflinks and sendfile... but that second one could have been a python/portage issue instead.

There was one instance of issues with encryption, but the feature was in testing at the time, and has long since been rectified.

As for failure modes... the first issue above caused issues with send/receive, the second issue caused empty/sparse files to be written instead of data, and the encryption issue caused issues with send/receive and/or garbage data.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?

#69

Post by _piif »

graypegg wrote: post #67
_piif wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've lost track of the amount of times I accidentally deleted a file I shouldn't have or messed up a git project in a way it'd have taken ages to untangle, said oops, remembered I have hourly snapper snapshots set up and just copied the previous state over. It's been a massive time- and occasionally lifesaver for me.

You know, that's very convincing actually! I'm obviously missing out, I'll need to mess around with it more.

If you decide to dive into it depending on your filesystem of choice I can recommend either Sanoid [0] and httm [1] for ZFS or Snapper [2] for BTRFS as automatic snapshot solutions. Good luck with your endeavors!

[0] https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid

[1] https://github.com/kimono-koans/httm

[2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Snapper

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't BTRFS the default FS in home-oriented Linux distributions?

#70

Post by ianai »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #63
ianai wrote: post #39

My question is why in 2023 isn’t there some better efforts to at least bring third party support for the various FSes to the various OSes? Or is it a side effect of streaming everything? Ie who cares. Ie file systems are solved tech and nothing really new until permanent storage is as fast as RAM in all aspects, replaces it, and we get some new computing paradigm.

> My question is why in 2023 isn’t there some better efforts to at least bring third party support for the various FSes to the various OSes? From the FS rather than the OS side, but I feel like support is pretty good? ZFS supports all the big ones and many smaller options - Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, illumos (albeit with some slight incompatibilities depending on enabled features). The only OS that I kind…

Windows is listed as alpha? Not sure about Mac support. https://openzfs.org/wiki/Distributions
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