Re:Linux 5.10 BTRFS performance regression
by solarkraft on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @07:31AM
(#25516877)
I've also been using btrfs for 5+ years. When the USB stick I keep my home server's file system on didn't boot after a power outage I stuck it into my PC, performed the simplest repair on it (don't remember which) and everything was great again.
The most annoying issue I've run into (and I really hate it) was being low on space and it being really hard to free some since it's very intransparent what's actually using it - but with btdu I mostly got that under control as well.
That said when repairing the boot drive I did experience some confusion due to there being multiple different ways - the documentation could be better on that front. For simple things at least (subvolume management, snapshot creation, checking free space) I've been quite happy with the btrfs command line tool.
Then a minor issue did happen, some files got missing after a system crash. That's not a problem in itself, that happens.
But then I discovered that the tooling of btrfs is awful to use. Tools to repair, restore, check, scrub, ... I think I got it to finally print some filenames of missing files after a huge amount of hoops. Just see how complex btrfs restore is: https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Restore. Ideally those tools would know how btrfs works internally including all indirections and be able to translate that into recovering files to the user, not have, for example, a user manually puzzle together objectid numbers from a huge list.
But anyway, that made me simply format everything back to ext4 and go with that again for now.
So, I was a happy btrfs user until I discovered how bad its tooling is. No issues with bugs or anything though.
I really want btrfs to become better given that it's present in the kernel and has checksums, cow, .... I hope it'll keep improving!