Re: Btrfs & Dolphin
Hello Gary.
Am Sonntag, 11. September 2016, 12:42:03 CEST schrieb Gary Dale:
> I just read an article in Linux Pro magazine (entitled "New Butter")
> about Btrfs. It ended rather enigmatically with a warning that "Btrfs
> does not integrate well with graphical file managers."
>
> This confuses me. I'd think that a file manager should operate pretty
> much independently of the file system and vice versa providing that the
> file system implements the basic Unix-type services (ownership,
> permissions, hierarchical directory structure, etc.). Can anyone
> elaborate on what the author may have been alluding to?
>
> I am running Debian/Stretch with the KDE/Plasma5 desktop and use Dolphin
> quite a bit. Btrfs is supposedly stable and offers features that could
> be quite useful to me. I've been considering switching from Ext4 for a
> while but don't have any compelling reasons to do so if the switch could
> cause problems with my normal workflow - such as not being able to use
> Dolphin.
The author most likely means that it doesn´t support restoring files from
snapshots and stuff like that. I.e. that it doesn´t support additional BTRFS
features.
Rest assured that Dolphin works perfectly well on a BTRFS filesystem. This
ThinkPad T520 is using BTRFS since I got it, about kernel 2.6.38/39 at that
time, and BTRFS DUAL SSD RAID 1 since about April 2014, kernel 3.14.
In case for BTRFS you may want to inform yourself about possible pitfalls and
not yet stable features tough. This is currently a discussion on BTRFS
mailinglist with hopefully some people working on improving the kernel wiki¹.
I also recommend to read Debian wiki page about it, since it contains many
hints about possible pitfalls². Although I didn´t have any issues with
compress=lzo that I am aware of, there may be some. And well avoid RAID 5 and
6 for now, I´d say. And if you use Debian Jessie, then also use backport
kernels.
[1] https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page
[2] https://wiki.debian.org/Btrfs
Thanks,
--
Martin
Reply to: