On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 5:34 PM, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.
<bss@iguanasuicide.net> wrote:
On Monday 26 April 2010 16:05:31 B. Alexander wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 2:22 PM, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. <
>
bss@iguanasuicide.net> wrote:
> > I'm also a current reiser3 user. I find the ability to shrink the
> > filesystem
> > to be something I am not willing to do without.
>
> You know, I said the same thing, but then as the kernel and GRUB and the
> like advanced, I noticed that my reiserfs partitions would have to replay
> the journal every time I rebooted, even after a clean shutdown. I started
> calculating how many times I shrunk any of my partitions in the last 8
> years, and I can only recall twice. And since I have several terabytes
> around the house, I figure I can migrate data and delete/recreate
> partitions if I really need to reduce it.
does not require a journal replay if I do a clean shutdown/reboot. A forced
reboot through Alt+SysRq+B does trigger a journal replay (as it should).
No, this is a result of sync;sync;shutdown -r now.
I also have 4+ tebibytes but most of them are allocated to filesystems. I've
had to shrink filesystems dozens of times since 2005, during or after a data
move.
I've had to extend on the fly many more times than I have had to reduce.
I don't use partitions (much), having been using LVM happily for everything
except /boot.
As am I. In fact, I even recreated a several of the reiser partitions on my workstation to see if it was something legacy that may have crept into the works. The next step is to rebuild, but there are a number of dependencies before I do that (I want to build 64-bit now that it seems ready for prime time, but I want to get a higher-end multicore chip, etc etc.)
I'm hoping to be able to move that onto LVM once I move to
GRUB2 and GPT.
You know, /boot on bare drive has never bothered me, especially since I use encrypted filesystems on everything but VMs. On laptops, I had it set up so /boot lived on a thumb drive...So I'm cool with it.
> > I have not read the rest of the thread, but my off-the-cuff
> > recommendation would be to start migration to btrfs. Now that the
> > on-disk format has stabilized, I am going to start testing it for
> > filesystems other than /usr/local, /var, and /home. Assuming I can keep
> > those running well for 6-12
> > months, I will migrate /usr/local, /var, and then /home, in that order,
> > with a
> > 1-3 month gap in between migrations.
>
> I might play with it for some non-critical partitions, or ones that I can
> mirror on an established filesystem, even if it is only to use in an
> "Archive Island" scenario, where I have a LV that I can mount, sync and
> umount. However, btrfs is not included in the kernel, is it? As I recall,
> nilfs2 has kernel support, but that was the only one of the new
> filesystems, at the time when I started looking at this.
btrfs is included in 2.6.31.12-0.2-default in openSUSE 11.2. It is also
included in linux-image-2.6-686 and linux-image-2.6-amd64 for lenny-backports,
testing, and sid. I don't normally deal with other
architectures/distributions, so it might also be available there.
It's not going to live anywhere that I am going to be experimenting on it other than 686 or amd64 (e.g. my firewall (SPARC), my N810 (ARM) or my WAP (MIPS)).
> > I've already encountered an issue related to btrfs in my very isolated
> > deployments. The initramfs created by update-initramfs does not appear
> > to mount it properly. Instead I am given an '(initramfs)' prompt and I
> > have to
> > mount the filesystem manually (a simple two-argument mount command
> > suffices)
> > and continue the boot process. This is fine for my laptop, but servers
> > (and
> > even my desktop) need to be able to boot unattended; I am still
> > investigating
> > the issue, which may just be due to my configuration.
>
> That is enough to give me pause...
It doesn't appear to be a file system issue, but rather a problem with the
initramfs scripts. It could also be rooted in my configuration. I know that
my "root=" kernel parameter has to differ from the device name in my
/etc/fstab in order to get the initramfs to correctly initialize LVM.
I don't mind being a first adopter for this in particular; I hope to be able
to report good things about btrfs by this time next year.
--
Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =.