[Freedombox-discuss] Switch to btrfs on the Freedombox?

[Anders Jackson]

Nice.

2014-11-08 20:43 GMT+01:00 Petter Reinholdtsen <pere at hungry.com>:
> [Sunil Mohan Adapa]
>> It would be nice to switch to Btrfs.

> Consider it done, at least as a test.  I've pushed changes to
> freedom-maker on alioth to create images using btrfs as the default
> file system.  Please test it and let me know what you think.

As an option, I guess it is ok.  But I would predere default to be
something more stable.  There are one or two horror stories to much
for me that say the toolbox isn't prime time yet.  But prepared for
those so incline, great.

> I switched to grub as a boot loader in the process, thus making sure
> kernel upgrades to not leave the system in a non-bootable state.

But grub doesn't work with ARM CPU:s, does it?

> I went with a btrfs layout of /btrfs having the root file system and
> the '@' subvolume being mounted as root.  This will allow us to
> snapshot @ and switch between root file system versions if we want to.
> It is inspired by the btrfs layout proposed on some Ubuntu page I read
> a long time ago.

You could get the same use with software raid, LVM2 and xfs, jfs and exfs4.
Yes, it *is* good to experiment with new stuff like btrfs.  If not for
anything else then getting more users on it.  But it should be an
option.

>> We could easily cook a preliminary Plinth UI module to take
>> snapshots and switch between snapshots.  There is also a proper
>> package manager coming to Plinth (for the sake of installing likes
>> of ownCloud).  We could the hook up the package manager to take a
>> snapshot before any package installation or system upgrade like is
>> suggested.

> Yeah. :)

I do like this, that was one very good thing about zfs I used on Solaris.
Should be possible to use with a setup with LVM2 on top of softvare raid.

But go on with btrfs, try to do some abstraction and it would be easy
to use any machanism that is has the capabilities needed.

/Jackson