After some initial learning and fiddling I have to say that I really like the features and possibilities of btrfs so far.
OK, features bring complexity as well ... some technology hides that more, some less. ... but it is really nice-to-have the option to snapshot your root-fs, do-something-to-it (emerge unstable stuff, delete the wrong files, you name it ...), and if you don't like it you simply boot using your snapshot ... that is actually really helpful and also rather easy once you get your head wrapped around the concepts and the few steps necessary (and it's quick: the snapshot is done in a blink ...) No specific benchmarks done here, the internet is full of ... so far the performance was not noticeable different from the ext4-fs before. This might be more visible with hdds, I only used SSDs so far. As far as I researched btrfs seems to be quite reliable in a not too complex (read: multi devices) setup ... and backups never hurt anyway. As I do backups all the time I feel quite confident to test my setups for the next few days and maybe even completely overhaul my desktop setup. -> 2x 1TB HDDs plus 1x 256GB SSD (plus the one older 80GB SSD for tests right now) ... with LVM and stuff (remember my hassles last week with the LVMs not activated??) ... I could run one btrfs-pool on the 2 HDDs and one on the SSD and cut all of my various filesystems out of that. Would mixing hdds and the ssd into one pool make sense? I think, no ... ? -- I will also test running VMs on btrfs-subvolumes and doing snapshots: snapshot the underlying subvolume, apply some changes within the VM and then rollback to the snapshot. This would remove LVM-snapshotting out of the way ... etc etc As mentioned before, looking forward ... and curious! Stefan
