[Btrfs-devel] btrfs on /

[Pär Andersson]

On Tuesday 05 February 2008 21:36:27 Christian Hesse wrote:
> now that I have a live CD with btrfs support I decided to give btrfs on
> root partition a try. I have good backups. ;) Here is what I have to tell
> so far:

Here is one more data point. As an experiment I have used btrfs
on / since 0.11 was released. Initially I believed that it
wouldn't survive more than a few days, but I was wrong and now I
must agree that it is quite stable. Great work!

I have btrfs / on a usb stick, so the old filesystems are still
safe on the hard drive if btrfs should eat my data.

I have only found two issues:

* No ENOSPC handling really sucks when your root file system is
  on a small usb stick. :-)

* APT (Debian/Ubuntu package management) crashes when it tries to
  read its package lists. I have not had time to debug this yet,
  but a simple "aptitude update" is enough to reproduce the
  problem:

root at garbage:~# aptitude update
-- snip --
Fetched 3B in 0s (11B/s) 
Reading package lists... Error!
E: Unable to determine the file size - fstat (75 Value too large for defined 
data type)
E: Can't mmap an empty file
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems
E: Empty package cache
E: Couldn't rebuild package cache
root at garbage:~# 


Regards,

Pär Andersson