package: debian-installer severity: wishlist It's enhancement proposal, not bug report. Now Debian system cannot use whole btrfs power, but we can improve it.
debian-installer can format disk with btrfs now, but it is NOT appropriate setting with btrfs. We can just format partion with btrfs but cannot create btrfs "subvolume" at that time. Subvolume is a bit special idea, you can slice one btrfs partion to some subvolume and can set quota for each subvolume, also mount directory and get snapshot for each. So, I'll propose debian-installer to add btrfs subvolume setting menu or add subvolume setting like SUSE by default. For detail, see Btrfs Wiki page https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Manpage/btrfs-subvolume Well, for exapmle, openSUSE's installer (YaST2?) creates defalut partition as btrfs and below subvolumes by default. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ @/boot/grub2/i386-pc @/boot/grub2/x86_64-efi @/home @/opt @/tmp @/usr/local @/var/crash @/var/lib/libvirt/images (option "no copy on write") @/var/lib/mailman @/var/lib/mariadb (option "no copy on write") @/var/lib/mysql (option "no copy on write") @/var/lib/named @/var/lib/pgsql (option "no copy on write") @/var/log @/var/opt @/var/spool @/var/tmp and default / subvolume. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ - Snapshotting is targeted to default / subvolume and whole system except above subvolumes. Separating some directories are very important for btrfs snapshot. It makes easy to rollback to previous snapshot image without any losing data. - And, "no copy on write" mount option is important for DB systems for performance. - I'm not sure why they separate /boot/grub2/i386-pc and x86_64-efi If it is hard to add creating subvolume menu, just follow SUSE's decision is worse. Some people says "btrfs is not stable", but SUSE and Oracle support it as commercial support. Some features like RAID5,6 is not stable as it says(*), but upstream developer Chris Mason says "Aging" state in Facebook(*). So it's worse to treat btrfs as sane choice and release its power as possible, IMO. *) https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Status *) https://youtu.be/W3QRWUfBua8?t=17m51s -- Regards, Hideki Yamane henrich @ debian.or.jp/org http://wiki.debian.org/HidekiYamane
