Hi, I’m planning fresh 13.2 installation and I was thinking about using brtfs for my root partition.
However the links below scared me a bit:
https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=905832
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=340657
http://www.ulduzsoft.com/2014/11/opensuse-13-2-do-not-use-btrfs-as-rootfs/
Are the patches backported to the main release? or should I stick to ext4…?
I use btfrs on servers with various levels of raid with a few dozen million users daily without issues.
SLES and openSUSE both.
Depnds ther are some teeth cutting problem with BTRFS. You also nee to allow more room if you plan to use snapper (on by default) It appears to be ok stability wise but you could run into some issues. So You feel like experimenting? You running a large commercial system? Then maybe give it a try. You want things to just work stick with ext4 for now. The issues that arise are more likely to show on reboots and hibernation so 24-7 operations won’t in general see them.
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Hmmm… Both Miuku and gogalthorp may have their points on use btrfs in large systems. I will gladly confess that is above my pay-grade. Way above.
On the other hand and the start of testing oS13.2 beta snapshots last year until up to now I can only remember that I have seen two (2) persons that have tested/had use) for the snapshot function here in the forum. This on a DE (Desktop) level.
This compared whit the numbers of posts and the time spent in the forum to help people out with btrfs problems?
So is it safe compared to the risks and the trouble to use it? No not on a DE level is my personal opinion.
On the other hand I should have test again (tested once but I think I had 1/2 broken HD then) when to try to restore a snapshot in pre-13.2 btrfs enviroment.
Will do so before my next post about btrfs. Could be nice to add that knowledge for my self :P.
regards
Thank you for your comments, now I have something to think about 
On my system opensuse 13.1 succeeded in crashing its btrfs root partition some weeks ago (all updates were installed). The lucky thing was, that the snapshots could be used to create a recent backup. The really bad thing was that btrfsck was not able to fix these errors. It made it even worse.
So my answer is: No it is not safe to use. Keep a backup and be prepared to manually recreate the root partition.
13.1’s kernel and btrfs tools were considerably older and less tested than those in SLES12 or openSUSE 13.2 though.
The only thing I don’t like is snapper and that’s mainly because I employ alternative snapshot tools for my purpose, other than that btrfs has been solid as a rock.
On 2015-01-26 20:26, eproxy wrote:
>
> Thank you for your comments, now I have something to think about
Recently an update to rpm/zypper broke in such a manner than updates to
correct the problem were impossible (zypper failed). However, some
people using btrfs and snapper could roll back the update, and regain
their system, instead of using downloading manually the packages and
using “rpm --install …” to install them. Others apparently reinstalled
their systems.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)