Re: Fedora 33 System-Wide Change proposal: Make btrfs the default file system for desktop variants
On Fri, 26 Jun 2020 12:30:02 -0500
Chris Adams <linux(a)cmadams.net> wrote:
So... I freely admit I have not looked closely at btrfs in some
time,
so I could be out of date (and my apologies if so). One issue that I
have seen mentioned as an issue within the last week is still the
problem of running out of space when it still looks like there's
space free. I didn't read the responses, so not sure of the
resolution, but I remember that being a "thing" with btrfs. Is that
still the case? What are the causes, and if so, how can we keep from
getting a lot of the same question on mailing lists/forums/etc.?
Yes, it happened to me last week. The workstation has been upgraded
since F25 and is now at F31. A yum update last week ran a restorecon
-r / which filled up the filesystem and RAM and swap. The 460 GB
filesystem had about 140GB of real data, 100 GB of data bloat from
underfull blocks, and the rest (200GB) was metadata. I had to boot
from a live USB and run btrfs balance to free up the bloat. I expect
to reformat it to ext4 when the quarantine is over.
This is my last BTRFS filesystem. One was on a laptop hard disk that
was painfully slow, especially when compared with it's ext4 twin
sitting next to it. It was reformatted to ext4. I also had a BTRFS
RAID 0 hard disk array. It was also slow and also ended up needing
rescue. I converted it over to xfs on MD raid and it's been faster
and perfectly reliable ever since.
While I like subvolumes and snapshots, I find the maintenance,
reliability, and performance overhead to be not worth it.
Not recommended.
Jim