In <pan.2011.05.07.10.57...@gmail.com>, Camaleón wrote: >On Fri, 06 May 2011 10:44:21 -0700, CACook wrote: >> This just started after my most recent (very painful) dist-upgrade. It >> seems that BTRFS is not compatible with grub and Debian. I very nearly >> lost my whole system because of this catastrophe. >> >> Does anyone know the nature of the error and how to fix? > >You're asking for so much :-) > >First, the btrfs filesystem is still very experimental so only use it if >you really (I mean *really*) know what you are doing and also know how to >deal when things go wrong. I would even expect data loss (directly or >indirectly related to the usage of this filesystem) so make daily backups >if needed.
As a current btrfs user, I don't recommend you run it on the Squeeze kernel (2.6.32-5) because there are certain circumstances where it doesn't gracefully handle out-of-space issues and that "df" reports for it lie. I recently filed a bug against the Debian kernel due to this; two BUG() calls within a second leading to a broken btrfs module and needing a reboot and some manual file system recovery. I don't recommend you use the Wheezy kernel (2.6.38-2 in the package name; 2.6.38-3 in the package version) either. There's a least one outstanding bug that I filed involving the in-kernel NULL pointer dereference while mounting a btrfs file system. Again, this leads to a broken btrfs module and needs a reboot to fix. However, it happens easy enough and consistently enough during the Debian boot process that it effectively makes that kernel unusable. I've not tested the Sid kernel; I may do that today. I thought 2.6.39-rc4 from experimental would work, but they haven't put the 2.6.39 kbuild infrastructure in experimental and I have an out-of-tree kernel module that I need for daily operations. This is a close second just because I don't have any experience with it, yet. Right now, my data losses due to btrfs, if any, are still unnoticed. However, I am more worried than ever before that I won't find a file system that meets my unique needs before I start losing data. My unique needs are: on-line growing, on- or off-line shrinking, good performance on 4+ TiB file systems with less than 4 GiB free space. For the few file systems I haven't converted to btrfs, I am still using reiserfs. FWIW, I don't think GRUB2 has BtrFS support, yet. So, you'd have to store your kernel and initrd on a different file system. -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. b...@iguanasuicide.net ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.net/ \_/
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