Re: [gentoo-user] boot problems

[covici@ccs.covici.com]

Stefan G. Weichinger <lists@xunil.at> wrote:

> Am 16.05.2014 14:03, schrieb Neil Bothwick:
> > On Fri, 16 May 2014 07:14:27 -0400, covici@ccs.covici.com wrote:
> > 
> >> So far, I have liked lvm, what's the advantage of btrfs over
> >> lvm?
> > 
> > I have only looked at btrfs, with a consideration for switching
> > from ZFS, but it seems to offer the same advantages as ZFS. That
> > is, it makes things even easier than LVM does. with LVM you can
> > easily resize volumes and the filesystems on them, but it is still
> > two or three steps, more if you add RAID into the equation. The
> > modern filesystems do it all at once. If you need a bigger var, you
> > just tell it so. And it is exactly the same process for shrinking a
> > volume, something that can be tricky with LVM because of the need
> > to handle volume and filesystem separately.
> 
> btrfs and zfs are removing the various layers we all had to deal with:
> 
> partitions, logical volumes, raid-arrays, filesystems, and then
> snapshots etc.
> 
> With these modern filesystems you are able to basically say:
> 
> "I have these physical devices/disks, create me a pool of storage with
> these properties" and then just use that pool in a flexible and
> dynamic way.
> 
> Your disk based storage is then usable in a way RAM is, you add it and
> it is available and you can then use it where you like it.
> 
> No (or let's say "much less" ...) fixed and hard barriers like
> partition sizes, if you need space for /var, use it ... if you want to
> set quotas on /home, just set them for the subvolume, if you add
> another pair of harddisks, tell btrfs to redistribute redundancy
> information ("re-balance").
> 
> (I see that Alan right now answered basically the same ;-) ).
> 
> You get checksums for your blocks and the possibility to repair rotted
> blocks ... you get snapshots within the filesystem, no more slow
> rsnapshot-crontabs ...
> 
> I used zfs-fuse back then and learned about the concepts, and it blew
> my mind already years ago ;-)
> 
> zfs on linux ... it works fine for me on one server, but I never
> really wanted it on my main machines (desktop and laptops) although I
> once even wrote some "how to use zfs on your fully encrypted laptop"
> for a magazine. It always feels like "suboptimal because it is not in
> the kernel" to me (think licensing issues here).
> 
> btrfs is officially in the kernel, still marked "experimental" because
> it is in active development, after all I read over the last days it
> should be quite stable to use if you don't run very complex setups or
> so ... and doing regular backups should be usual for the people in
> this list, I assume? Distros like SLES come with btrfs as default fs
> (soon).
> 
> I migrated ~3 machines to btrfs in the last days and I really love
> getting rid of all the partitions and raids that grew over the years
> ... for now it is cleaned up and flexible and so far solid.
> 
> btrfs and zfs have different concepts for various aspects, but
> basically the same goals. I definitely recommend to get in touch with
> this generation of filesystems.

Thanks much for that explanation.

So where do I find some documentation for btrfs and its user space tools?
-- 
Your life is like a penny.  You're going to lose it.  The question is:
How do
you spend it?

         John Covici
         covici@ccs.covici.com