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 _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
