Re: [gentoo-user] btrfs conversion: first impressions

["Stefan G. Weichinger" <lists@xunil.at>]

After some initial learning and fiddling I have to say that I really
like the features and possibilities of btrfs so far.

OK, features bring complexity as well ... some technology hides that
more, some less.

... but it is really nice-to-have the option to snapshot your root-fs,
do-something-to-it (emerge unstable stuff, delete the wrong files, you
name it ...), and if you don't like it you simply boot using your
snapshot ... that is actually really helpful and also rather easy once
you get your head wrapped around the concepts and the few steps
necessary (and it's quick: the snapshot is done in a blink ...)

No specific benchmarks done here, the internet is full of ... so far the
performance was not noticeable different from the ext4-fs before. This
might be more visible with hdds, I only used SSDs so far.

As far as I researched btrfs seems to be quite reliable in a not too
complex (read: multi devices) setup ... and backups never hurt anyway.

As I do backups all the time I feel quite confident to test my setups
for the next few days and maybe even completely overhaul my desktop setup.

-> 2x 1TB HDDs plus 1x 256GB SSD (plus the one older 80GB SSD for tests
right now) ... with LVM and stuff (remember my hassles last week with
the LVMs not activated??) ... I could run one btrfs-pool on the 2 HDDs
and one on the SSD and cut all of my various filesystems out of that.

Would mixing hdds and the ssd into one pool make sense? I think, no ... ?

--

I will also test running VMs on btrfs-subvolumes and doing snapshots:

snapshot the underlying subvolume, apply some changes within the VM and
then rollback to the snapshot.

This would remove LVM-snapshotting out of the way ... etc etc

As mentioned before, looking forward ... and curious!

Stefan