Usage of NILFS2 for /home

vinhsynd · 2011-11-05 03:24:03

I've been interested in all of the new file systems in development and after some basic reading have come to the notion that NILFS2 would be well suited to a /home partition.
Now I'm a definitely not as well read as most here, and certainly don't have a deep grasp of btrfs, however it seems that continuous file system snapshoting would be a great version control system for user generated files.

Before I went off experimenting I wanted to give the idea a sanity check here with everyone first.

Thanks for any thoughts.

bruce · 2011-11-06 21:52:13

I'm using nilfs as my root partition now (which includes home) and I love it :-)
It does have a space usage overhead from the snapshotting, and I have issues running the cleaner daemon when using BFS (ie it doesn't run...); but apart from that I find it rock solid :-)
I was running both btrfs and nilfs for a while and found - very subjectively - that the nilfs partition responded better during use, but would slow down during disk cleaning (which can be configured, so not a big issue for me :-) ). It also didn't bone my data multiple times like the btrfs partition did...
The snapshotting is super useful, but for now rolling back to a particular snapshot isn't possible - you can only mount from a particular point in history as readonly - but you then could rsync (or some such) back on top of the current head to "revert" to that state.
Development of nilfs seems to have slowed since about the kernel.org hack timeframe though, but I don't know if that means anything...

Anything else you'd like to know? :-)

dlin · 2011-11-09 06:31:33

I've tryied to use NILFS2 as my archlinux root from April till now(Nov.)
I fallback to ext4 today.

Because it occurs terrible error, which can not recovery automatically.

The error message like:

nilfs_ioctl_move_inode_block conflicting data buffer

I'm wonder if my ssd is old as two years, could I use this NILFS2 to extend my ssd's life.
And, if my some block of my ssd is broken, could NILFS2 auto recover?

I found it can not auto recover.

duquesnc · 2012-02-01 09:29:55

My home is under nilfs2, but I recently discovered that its usage is somewhat incompatible with laptop-mode-tools (see https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1049556 for more info).

Arch Linux

#1 2011-11-05 03:24:03

Usage of NILFS2 for /home

#2 2011-11-06 21:52:13

Re: Usage of NILFS2 for /home

#3 2011-11-09 06:31:33

Re: Usage of NILFS2 for /home

#4 2012-02-01 09:29:55

Re: Usage of NILFS2 for /home

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