Hi! I just saw this mentioned on a BBS I'm on:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/BtrfsByDefault
I'll admit, I'm incredibly surprised, and pleased, to see that this
might happen. I do have three items of concern as Joe End User. (Do
note that for home use (where I use btrfs) I'm usually on Ubuntu or a
variant and not RH, if that matters.)
* Swap files. At least last time I checked, it was a PITA to take a
snapshot of a volume that had a swapfile on it -- I wound up writing a
wrapper that goes, does a swapoff, removes the file, creates the
snapshot, and then re-creates the file. Is this still "a thing"? Or
is there a way to work around that that isn't kludgey?
* When Stuff Goes Wrong(tm). Again, my experience is not terribly
current, but when things hit the fan, for most FSes, you do an
fsck -y /path/to/dev
and hope things come together. But with btrfs, it seems that it's
substantially more complicated to figure out what to do. Have the
tools, perhaps, been updated to help end users figure out what choices
to make, etc., when dealing with an issue?
* RAID 5/6. Last time I looked, that was in an unhappy state, so I just
set up a RAID with mdadm, lay btrfs on top of that, and call it good.
That seems to do the job, though it loses lots of smarts that would be
had with btrfs running the RAID. I see discussion on the wiki
(https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/RAID56) talking about an RFC
submitted to address the underlying issues; is this still broken?
Thanks much,
-Ken
P.S. If there's a better mailing list, e.g., "end user questions" or
something, please feel free to point me to it.
