BTRFS filesystem format

Filemanagers, partitioning tools, etc.
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rhadon
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Joined: Thu 27 Mar 2008, 11:05
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BTRFS filesystem format

#1 Post by rhadon »

A short while ago I stumbled over BTRFS. With Gparted 0.11.0 (the common version 0.8.1 doesn't work) I was able to format a 1G partition of my usb stick with this fs and to use it. And I compared:

Code: Select all

FS    used space after formatting
FAT32        2.08M
NTFS          5.75M
ext2         17.89M
ext3         49.93M
ext4         49.93M
reiser       32.11M
xfs           10.08M
btrfs         28.00k (k, no typo) 
This looks very attractive to me. Kernel since 2.6.38 can handle this format, Gparted can do it, but not Grub, Grub4Dos, Initrd, Pmount and so on.

I know that this file system is experimental (till now no working repair tools) but I would expect more interest on the puppy front. Only scsijon mentioned btrfs sometimes.

Is it too soon? Do I miss something?

Regards
Rolf
Ich verwende "frugal", und das ist gut so. :wink:
Raspberry Pi without Puppy? No, thanks.

aarf

#2 Post by aarf »

Have seen and had this file system on externals when temporarily wandering to other distros. Cant remember which ones perhaps fedora mego or mint. Didnt really play long enough to form an opinion of btrfs. I like the recoverability of ext3 as i am careless with my battery monitoring and have defective power cables. If btrfs can recover from power outage as well as ext3 i would of course be most interested in the space saving.

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Eyes-Only
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#3 Post by Eyes-Only »

Myself as well! 28k? WHOA!!! :shock: I mean... that's astounding! Of course Rolf, as you've written, this is still rather "experimental" as a file system. So you know what I see in my "crystal ball"? I see more and more Devs working to develop the filing system until - before you know it! - it too will be consuming a hefty chunk of the blank/available space of the partition so that ext3 will still remain the "apple of our eye" for most/many Linux users.

But I must confess that it really is disheartening to go and format a 100gig partition only to see so much of it eaten up by the file system alone! And often times it's far, far, more than our precious operating system we've all come to know and love that we're installing into that very space! :cry:

Keep us posted Rolf if you will? Thanks!

Ciao/Amicalement/"Mit besten wishen",

Eyes-Only
"L'Peau-Rouge d'Acadie"
*~*~*~*~*~*
Proud user of LXpup and 3-Headed Dog. 8)
*~*~*~*~*~*

aarf

#4 Post by aarf »

Cant find gparted .11 in my puppies or searching the forum.

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rhadon
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#5 Post by rhadon »

I compared a little bit more. I formatted a 22.46GB partition, copied 55 files with ~10GB (55 different puppy ISOs :P ) then copied this files once more to a subfolder (~20GB). See attachment. As you can see, ext3 uses ~520-560MB more space than btrfs, ~490MB more than reiserfs and ~470MB more than ntfs.

I also used reiserfs for several month with Lupu-525. For the partition and for my save file. I mentioned it several times but no one was interested. I can confirm that it's at least as stable as ext3. I did a lot of improper shutdowns. During boot, partition system check (reiserfsck) was a lot faster than e2fsck on a similar partition, formatted with ext3. But it's not supported by initrd. It's the only reason that I don't use it for my save files. Too much work to patch the init script for every new puppy version.

@Aarf
I use the Gparted live cd, thinking it was from here, stable release.

Cheers
Rolf
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Ich verwende "frugal", und das ist gut so. :wink:
Raspberry Pi without Puppy? No, thanks.

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sunburnt
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#6 Post by sunburnt »

I`m not sure what your data is showing, but I`m guessing less is better?

I don`t think ext4 is much different than Brtfs or Xfs in drive usage.

My main interest is that all of the above FS will do compression.
But I don`t know how to enable it and control which comp. format it uses.

I want to make a compressed image file of Puppy`s Save file.
Then a 1/2 GB will be like the Save file being over 1 GB, much better.

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