does btrfs make sens on a notebook, shall I re-install with ext4?

Hi,

I have Leap on 2 notebooks, both wiith sometimes, responsibility problems.
First I thought this might be an gnome issue, but now I an nearly sure that btrf asks causes those system hangs

I looked bit more and found that there are also a lot of cron jobs with btrfs tasks,
a strange one it btrfs-trim, I am on a notebook with ssd, but running this says
‘the discard operation is not supported’

all the other tasks, I have no use for them, snapper, never needed, and I have no clue what the rest is doing.

I also found this
https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1017461

I have disabled now quota on x121e, which I use to have on a hdmi monitor to watch vids and which often froze for longer time
I have no idea about the side effects of doing this

all this is pretty frustrating, what stupid problems ,freezing desktops , unstable wifi connections, and this with something that should be stable?

I wounder if I should re install with ext4, or just put something else than openSuse on my 2 notebooks.
I need those just to work, I do not want to be a guinea pig for Suse, and I am frustrated about the stupid default installation that adds all this feature **** on a notebook.
Am I over reacting?

To be perfectly honest, I’m also considering moving away from Btrfs to ext4 on my Leap 42.3 notebook.

Yes, the symptoms you’ve described are also what I sometimes experience – 80 GB Btrfs “root” partition and the rest of the Terabyte SSHD for 8 GB swap and the rest as XFS “home” partition – I occasionally manually execute the Btrfs “housekeeping” scripts located in directories “/etc/cron.monthly” and “/etc/cron.weekly/”.

Therefore, given what you’re experiencing, I suggest that you try a “quick and dirty” Leap 42.3 re-install (reformat only the “root” partition with ext4).
I have mixed feelings about the “often used” Laptop configuration of “enough Swap for hibernation and the rest a single large ext4 partition”.The reason is, my preference for having “tmp/” and “/var/” in a partition separate from the user data partition.

Maybe, but on my side I always stick with EXT4 on my “work horse” laptop with an SSD and Gnome without any of the problems you describe. Basically I don’t know enough of BTRFS to dig me out in case of trouble.
Do you have a /root partition too small for your installed stuff? 20GB are OK with Ext4, 50 or more are generally recommended for a typical BTRFS install.
Don’t use snapper and snapshots? It can be disabled.
“Discard not supported”? Maybe your SSD needs a different trim method.
SSD unable to sustain the throughput of cron jobs (sounds odd…): maybe it needs some (5-7%) uncommitted space for its own housekeeping (Samsung drives apparently need that).

Long story short, if a reformat of /root to EXT4 and “quick reinstall” is a viable option to you, it seems worth a shot. If not so, maybe your most annoying problem can be dealt with another way.

If you are not a freak, stay away from BTRFS, it’s simply not read yet. Who made it the default for root partition is not a very wise man, to say it in a polite way…

Hi
Is this a Samsung SSD? It might be blacklisted… Intel graphics?

Not had this issue with btrfs, GNOME DE with SSD’s, but I would check the above first before looking at switching to ext4.

Come on, that’s declaring SUSE customers to freaks, SLE uses btrfs as a default, and it is ready. Question is whether a home user really needs it. Liking it or not has nothing to do with quality. Mind, on my laptop I use ext4 for / but my servers have btrfs and this has saved my ** a couple of times in such a way that only a reliable product can.

Hi
Also worth reading;
https://www.suse.com/communities/blog/butter-bei-die-fische/

I had initially 5 systems with openSUSE and BTRFS. None worked without problems within the first 3-4 months. Systems not booting anymore, no free space, etc. pp. Reinstalled them all with EXT4 on the same hardware, all doing fine since then for more than a 1 year at least. Sorry, but I don’t need such a file system.

Hi
Observations are appreciated, these are technical forums, please stay focused on the technical issues of the original poster, sure it could be the file system, but could also be something else.

@OP, also checking coredumps may provide some further insights;


coredumpctl list

Please, again: these are support forums. If you want to rant / discuss opinions, use the Chit-chat or Soapbox subforums.

Thanks for all the feedback!

coredumpctl list is interesting, but has nothing relevant to report,
2 times gnome shell some months agoe, some WebKit whatever even longer ago, and chrome

my SSD is one an intel, the other I do not know

I will observe the situation a little bit, but I think I will reinstall with ext4 as I have it with my rock stable Slackware boxes
everything in one partition, except boot, swap for hypernate and /tmp will become tmpfs

my trust in brtfs is a bit damaged, also I do not need any of the btrfsfeatures on my note books so I think using ext4 will make me more happy

just booted into my thinkpad t460p
it was unused for some day

system basically unusable thanks to brtfs balance, what is this and who needs this?

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-8mMN2BJNU6csvpdxVIR-LRw-Xmxf7CrvmOhopl7PAbNriz5_hJ_9RkMkrFQaLHoptv5v2QnsY9HK8ObHoS4nTlEJGyZ2TtZPl5nKPWQEjRToH2PPIFUY14isQ1qdlZHgYTtVH47CDykn8hoZVHi0lxB2B4klYpiB0DyEv0bW6ruGp1vDhHnMRorgNsO72lAMDFUS-1-fSjz4f0nzTZ2bhTMow5xfwyMB-nczTOv30Ruo03eOxBnNrHeyyi0ZD_kAsyn92EBEy7CU9OTyZU-yTMnzn6B6l_x2fpDw1BZA9jaWqmdzMQr9pbzex-ZcMRylRRU-06tvmQOk67-qsz_TSk5axnzdBm6uY0jT0Mr2c5jqDMN_j-GUNErXW-59feYcG09DZwIMR5g7J1GnlEwWE6Zhuy5S2hI1GVZ3fKTyIrnpLSSHy7eNTw1Bp3zV6LzL1wbQYkjDG86pK7WedHTFeCE0Dr9lRFZghgL6XmqDgppHsIMb7wevYWievMQbwojsqUKeIltTJ-kBEr-3hlv7MJiB9F-XXKaO62BCLbyYysM4lbCnnR0Y3pstqBqiKC6eYitaaLr40x5MyyAdnzBPZKKkY7A5mxFbu05qUfbyw=w2235-h1259-no

It adds to the discussion technically. 5 systems that went from problematic to working with a btrfs → ext4 change is notable. I had the same experience back in the day moving away from reiserfs, I was astounded at the performance difference after moving back to ext3/4. These are valid observations. A typical end-user doesn’t want to get technically deep – if reinstalling openSUSE with a different set of options solves the issue at hand, they are fine with that. If it doesn’t solve the issue, the poster will be back, and we’ll have a new data point.

I installed on btrfs exactly once. Since then I installed a dozen times on notebooks and desktops using ext4 exclusively. ext4 is carefree (which really matters) and its a great performer even with large file systems:https://blogs.fau.de/ftp/2015/06/15/changing-filesystems-from-xfs-to-ext4/

Hmmm. On this Leap 42.2 system I have ext4 for the system partitions and XFS for the user Home partitions (also when it was a 13.2 system) – so far, no issues with XFS.
On a Leap 42.3 Laptop I have an 80 GB Btrfs system partition and the rest of the 1 TB SSHD has an XFS Home partition – also no issues with XFS to date.

BTRFS features which are not available in EXT4

Automatic self-repair
Rollback to a previous snapshot
File(s) undelete(different than an entire partition shapshot)

Still, ext4 has made some nice improvements over the years and is plenty reliable. I can’t even remember in recent memory having to do an fschk on an EXT4.
And, in the past I’ve used the following to give myself the ability to recover partitions and files on an ext4.
Of course, it has to be installed, configured and running <before> you need to recover something.
http://extundelete.sourceforge.net/

TSU