snapper

her stuff is gravy: it's a bonus. There are distros that use Btrfs that don't use snapshots, such as Fedora. Some Btrfs advocates use this to claim that the problems are not problematic. If the filesystem is of interest on the basis of feature $FOO, then "product $BAR does not exhibit this problem" is not an endorsement or a refutation if $BAR does not use feature $FOO. Btrfs RAID is broken in important ways, but that is not a deal-breaker because there are other perfectly good ways of obtaining that functionality using other parts of the Linux stack. If no feature or functionality is lost considering the OS and stack as a whole, then that isn't a problem. However, this remains serious and an issue. Additional problems include: • Poor integration into the overall industry-wide OS stack. Examples: - Existing commands do not work or give inconsistent results. - Duplication of functionality (e.g. overlap with `mdraid`) • Poor integration into specific vendors' OS stacks. Examples: - SUSE uses Btrfs heavily. But SUSE's `zypper` package manager is not integrated with its `snapper` tool. Zypper doesn't include snapshot space used by Snapper in its space estimation. Snapper is integrated with Btrfs; licence restrictions notwithstanding, I would be much reassured if Snapper supported other COW filesystems. (This has been attempted but I don't think anything shipped -- https://github.com/openSUSE/snapper/issues/145 . I welcome correction on this!) The transactional features of SUSE's MicroOS family of distros rely heavily on Btrfs. As such, this lack of awareness of snapshot space utilization deeply worries me. I have raised this with SUSE management, but my concerns were dismissed. That worries me. What I want to see, for clarity, is for Zypper to look at what packages will be replaced, then ask the FS how big the consequent snapshot will be, and include that snapshot in its space estimation checks before beginning the operation so that at least the packaging operation can be safely aborted before starting. A better implementation would be to integrate package management with snapshot management so that older snapshots could be automatically pruned to ensure necessary space is made available, while also ensuring that a pre-operation snapshot is retained for rollback. That's harder but would work better. As it is, currently neither is attempted, and Zypper will start actions that result in filling the disk and thus trashing the FS, and there are no working repair tools to recover. - Red Hat removed Btrfs support from RHEL. As a result it has had to bodge transactional package management together by grafting Git-like functionality into OStree, then building two entirely new packaging systems around OStree, one for the OS itself and a different one for GUI-level packages. The latter is Flatpak, of course. This strikes me as prime evidence that: 1. Btrfs isn't ready. 2. Linux needs an in-kernel COW filesystem -- because much of the complexity of OStree, Flatpak, Nix/NixOS, Guix, SUSE's `transactional-update` commands and so on would be rendered unnecessary if it were in there.