Hi Peter, On 11/03/2014 12:29 PM, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote: > > This weekend I finally was able to find a way for vmdebootstrap to > create a bootable virtual Debian disk with root as a btrfs subvolume. > The patch is available in <URL: https://bugs.debian.org/741223 >. >
Let me first say I think it's awesome what you are doing. People working with btrfs is very useful. I've been following btrfs mailinglist on and off to see if I can use it for some kind of production use. I'm sorry I didn't reply to your email earlier. I saw your email when I was at work last week but I didn't have time to reply and forgot to send in an email later on. > The reason I have been working on this is because I believe a FreedomBox > system would work better with a file and disk volume system that can be > extended without remount and reboot, handle snapshots and provide > resilience against block corruption. As far as I know, the only option > with these features included in Debian today is btrfs. If zfs show up > on Linux in Debian, it would be an option too. > > This would allow us to plug new disks into the freedombox and add them > to the storage system, and migrate data from the internal disk to the > external disk (and back) if we want to. > > This would also ensure blocks are checksummed all the way through the > storage stack, making it possible to detect data corruption (and > automatically correct for such corruption if a RAID like setup is > configured) that would not be detected using ext3/4. > > The btrfs file system is generally seen as sligthly unstable, and > earlier could cause data loss. I have not heard any such reports the > last two years, but it should be part of the evaluation. It earlier had > problems when running out of disk space, but I have not heard about such > problems lately. > But let me point out that these errors can still occur: "And btrfs can automatically allocate data and metadata chunks on demand -- the catch is that it can't automatically unallocate chunks on demand[1], a balance is required for that" [1] Yet. There's patches circulating that once thru discussion and merged, should let btrfs automatically handle at least the normal cases of data/metadata chunk imbalance. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.file-systems.btrfs/39800/focus=39943 > So the question to discuss is, should we (when the patch in the bug > report above) switch the freedom-maker scripts to create systems with > btrfs? Anyone against it? > I'm not a freedombox developer, just an observer. _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list Freedombox-discuss@lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss