On 08/29/2011 03:22 PM, Simon Schneider wrote:
I got even more curious about btrfs after following this discussion and installed it on my primary laptop (I planned a reinstall anyway to get rid of windows). Installation worked perfectly with Archboot, setting up two subvolumes, both compressed and everything worked perfectly for about a week: My DVR stick made the computer freeze (this happens like twice a year) and therfore I had to hard reset the machine with the effect that it rendered the filesystem unusable for the linux kernel. Grub could still read the kernel image and booted it just fine, but as soon as the kernel tried to mount the filesystem it crashed. I tried to recover with a live cd, but because I had no internet access at that time, and man pages weren't very helpful either I eventuelly just reinstalled Arch using the familiar lvm2 + ext4 setup. Btrfs is great, don't get me wrong, it really is fast and snapshots and all that worked really great, but it is, sadly, a little bit too unstable to use it anywhere than on a test machine. Even if you have UPS and all kind of measurements to prevent such power failures and hard resets, your computer still might hang at some point and then you'll really are in big troubles.
I had the same experience with a new Arch install. On shutdown the computer hung, and after a hard reset the file system was trashed with no way to recover. I went back to ext4. While it ran it was fast though, and I look forward to using it again, but only after an fsck utility becomes available.
Jon
