On Thursday 06 August 2015 12:09:20 Jeremi Piotrowski wrote: > On Thu, 6 Aug 2015, Peter Humphrey wrote: > > First, btrfs balance. I had no idea that was needed, so of course I didn't > > include it in my attempts. Could that be why, on booting, the kernel > > couldn't mount the file system? > > I don't think that balancing an empty btrfs filesystem is necessary. It > should have no effect at this point and would not affect the kernel's > ability to mount the btrfs volume.
So that won't have been my problem then. > > Second, --xattrs on the tarball extraction. I haven't seen this > > recommended > > before, and I wonder what extra attributes are needed for btrfs. > > This is part of the normal installation procedure and is not specific to > btrfs. See [1]. For all I know this has always been part of the > installation. Well, as I said, I've never seen it before. > > Third, why do you do your kernel compiling in /var/tmp/linux? It seems > > like > > extra work and I can't see a reason for it. > > The kernel developers recommend to __never__ compile the kernel as root. > You never know when something like `rm -rf /` might creep into the > Makefile ;) Is that a real fear, or paranoia gone to extremes? :-) > > Finally, can I assume that your procedure would work just as well > > installing into, say, /dev/sd[ab]4? > > Yep, but as stated by Rich there isn't much to a btrfs raid 1 install > aside from mkfs.btrfs, building btrfs support into the > kernel, the slightly different fstab entry, and using an initramfs (dracut > makes it easy). I've done all those things several times in the past week or two and come up against a kernel panic every time. > I do recommend that you try it in a virtual machine first. Good idea. I'll do that. Restoring the original system has been a nuisance each time, what with md raid 1, lvm2 and so on. Creating a 500GB md device seems to take for ever. -- Rgds Peter
