Btrfs for Fedora desktop variants - Xfce

[Neal Gompa]

Hey all,

Chris Murphy and I are working on a change to switch Fedora's desktop
variants to Btrfs[1]. The plan is for all Fedora desktop variants to
switch over, which means both release-blocking desktops
(Workstation/GNOME and KDE) will use Btrfs by default going forward. I
expect this to be a smooth change, as Btrfs has been a
release-blocking filesystem for many years now (at least since Fedora
20) and has had OpenQA tests to verify its functionality for nearly as
long as OpenQA has been in use in Fedora for testing. And I've
personally been using Btrfs on all my Fedora systems (~5 physical
machines and ~100 virtual machines) since 2015 with no issues.

I would like to have someone from the Xfce SIG sign on and be listed
as a Change owner. My expectation is that there should be no work for
the Xfce SIG to do, as I am taking care of that work centrally for all
variants involved. For all the words that are in the change
proposal[1], the extent of the change is to flip the settings in
Anaconda to use Btrfs by default on new installations.

Please take a look and let me know what you think. I'd appreciate a
response soon so that I can update it and submit the change proposal
to the Change Wrangler. Ideally, I'd like to submit it later today or
tomorrow. :)

Thanks in advance and best regards,
Neal

[1]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/BtrfsByDefault

--
真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!

[Mukundan Ragavan]

Hi Neal,

On 6/23/20 2:30 PM, Neal Gompa wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> I would like to have someone from the Xfce SIG sign on and be listed
> as a Change owner.

Please list me as a change owner. I run xfce installed on btrfs on my
laptops and desktop already.

Quick look through on the change proposal looks great!

Thanks for doing this.

Best,
Mukundan.

[Neal Gompa]

On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 2:40 PM Mukundan Ragavan  wrote:
> Hi Neal,
>
> On 6/23/20 2:30 PM, Neal Gompa wrote:
> > Hey all,
> >
> > I would like to have someone from the Xfce SIG sign on and be listed
> > as a Change owner.
>
> Please list me as a change owner. I run xfce installed on btrfs on my
> laptops and desktop already.

Awesome, thanks!
> Quick look through on the change proposal looks great!
>
> Thanks for doing this.

Thank you for doing great work with Xfce! :)

[Raul Fenossi]

Hello all I think is a very good idea the change that are coming, the only
question I have is more faster in terms of benchmarks btrfs vos ext4, alot
of people use fedora xfce because
are a little faster distro because is x colesterol free less I/o than other
gnome kde distros apps and services. Is right the change? Or only for have
a better support for containers servers etc. Remember people that use xfce
are for workstation proposal not server production porpoises. Thanks for
all the great job and effort the community make For fedora.

On Tue, 23 Jun 2020 at 18:24 Neal Gompa  wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 2:40 PM Mukundan Ragavan 
> wrote:
> > Hi Neal,
> >
> > On 6/23/20 2:30 PM, Neal Gompa wrote:
> > > Hey all,
> > >
> > > I would like to have someone from the Xfce SIG sign on and be listed
> > > as a Change owner.
> >
> > Please list me as a change owner. I run xfce installed on btrfs on my
> > laptops and desktop already.
>
> Awesome, thanks!
> > Quick look through on the change proposal looks great!
> >
> > Thanks for doing this.
>
> Thank you for doing great work with Xfce! :)
>
> --
> 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!
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[Neal Gompa]

On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 7:04 PM Raul Fenossi  wrote:
> Hello all I think is a very good idea the change that are coming, the only question I have is more faster in terms of benchmarks btrfs vos ext4, alot of people use fedora xfce because
> are a little faster distro because is x colesterol free less I/o than other gnome kde distros apps and services. Is right the change? Or only for have a better support for containers servers etc. Remember people that use xfce are for workstation proposal not server production porpoises. Thanks for all the great job and effort the community make For fedora.

Hello Raul,

I think there are benefits to be had with Btrfs even with Xfce.
Personally, I haven't had issues even running Btrfs on a Raspberry Pi,
and that's about as constrained as it typically gets. For all
filesystems, you tend to see the bottleneck on the I/O hardware that
exists on the computer. These days, any machine at any cost range
should be fine. Btrfs *is* more sensitive to faulty hardware, but I
think the idea of knowing that your storage hardware is broken rather
than allowing silent corruption is probably a good thing. :)

The most constrained environment I've run Btrfs on Fedora for is a
Fedora LXQt VM on 2GB of RAM and 40GB of disk with 2 vCPU cores. I
noticed no issues compared to larger setups or my physical machines,
so I think it'll be fine. :)

[Chris Murphy]

Hi,

Yep, it's a good question. Btrfs is slower on some things and faster on others. It's tedious to do good benchmarking, not least of which is synthetic benchmarks are only helpful if they truly approximate your workload.

One of the optional features being considered in the proposal is compression for select directories. This reduces the amount of reads and writes, which reduces latencies, and can sometimes improve performance. It'll also increase flash lifespan due to less write amplification.

The main goal is to make sure most folks don't notice the change, and don't have to learn a bunch of new commands or start doing strange rituals to hand hold the file system. And not expect people to become file system experts to benefit from some useful features.

--
Chris Murphy