Arch Linux

archer42

Member

Registered: 2011-06-10

Posts: 92

BTRFS on root recommand

Hi,

I want to reinstall my archlinux and want to ask if the use of btrfs is recommand or at least nothing dangerous (data is safe on the server I just don't want to have issues trying to boot)?

I did already on try installing archlinux with the archboot image and btrfs as root and became:
can't find fsck.btrfs error
mounted root
/sbin/init does not exist
youre on youre own to fix this

Have I forgotten to merge the btrfs package?

Jristz

Member

From: America/Santiago

Registered: 2011-06-11

Posts: 1,022

Re: BTRFS on root recommand

At point that I know btrfs use btrfsck for remplacenment to fsck.btrfs
but btrfsck not use the same API that a standard fsck.* this is the reason wath not simlinked are

but the fact that not mkinitcpio detect the btrfsck how a remplacenment not sure if a bug or is sintentional

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Well, I suppose that this is somekind of signature, no?

Ranmaru

Member

From: Japan

Registered: 2011-11-20

Posts: 60

Re: BTRFS on root recommand

I use btrfs on root and home and ext2 on boot and have no problems. Yes, the boot process shows me this "fsck not found" error every time but other than that I've had no problems whatsoever. I've never encountered your error. In fact, fsck is not as necessary as a lot of people think it is, and in case of emergency I still can manually use btrfsck. I guess in the future the whole thing will be properly implemented, but as of now, I don't see any problems using btrfs in its current state. However, keeping backups, just in case, is probably a good idea -- but then, you should do that anyway, btrfs or not.

That being said, I'm not sure if I would actually use it on a server or anything where I value data security over everything else. On the other hand, I would probably use FreeBSD with ZFS on that in the first place instead of Arch.

mir

Member

Registered: 2010-08-25

Posts: 59

Re: BTRFS on root recommand

I tried it out for a few weeks on the root partition. I experienced three times that the file system was full even though there should be still a lot of space available (16 GB actual data on a 21 GB lvm volume), and it was not possible to recover from that without copying everything to a new file system.

The condition was very strange - df showed lots of free space, deleting files in various ways did not change anything, attempting to rebalance resulted in "out of space" error, brtfsck did not help, neither. I went back to my old setup.

I'd recommend to stay away from btrfs.

graysky

Wiki Maintainer

From: :wq

Registered: 2008-12-01

Posts: 10,600

Website

Re: BTRFS on root recommand

BTRFS looks good but the fact that they made their own fsck util instead of using the de facto standard interface [e2fsck] is kinda arrogant to me.  If you do have problems with your root partition, you'll have to boot to a live cd or the like to attempt to fix it!

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