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

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

This weekend I finally was able to find a way for vmdebootstrap to
create a bootable virtual Debian disk with root as a btrfs subvolume.
The patch is available in <URL: https://bugs.debian.org/741223 >.

The reason I have been working on this is because I believe a FreedomBox
system would work better with a file and disk volume system that can be
extended without remount and reboot, handle snapshots and provide
resilience against block corruption.  As far as I know, the only option
with these features included in Debian today is btrfs.  If zfs show up
on Linux in Debian, it would be an option too.

This would allow us to plug new disks into the freedombox and add them
to the storage system, and migrate data from the internal disk to the
external disk (and back) if we want to.

This would also ensure blocks are checksummed all the way through the
storage stack, making it possible to detect data corruption (and
automatically correct for such corruption if a RAID like setup is
configured) that would not be detected using ext3/4.

The btrfs file system is generally seen as sligthly unstable, and
earlier could cause data loss.  I have not heard any such reports the
last two years, but it should be part of the evaluation.  It earlier had
problems when running out of disk space, but I have not heard about such
problems lately.

So the question to discuss is, should we (when the patch in the bug
report above) switch the freedom-maker scripts to create systems with
btrfs?  Anyone against it?

-- 
Happy hacking
Petter Reinholdtsen