BTRFS (file system) + PUPPY????

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Subito Piano
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BTRFS (file system) + PUPPY????

#1 Post by Subito Piano »

So -- is BTRFS coming to Puppy anytime soon?

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Flash
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#2 Post by Flash »

What is BTRFS?

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Subito Piano
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#3 Post by Subito Piano »

New file system - in development since '07 -- see the wikipedia entry. Newer kernels are compatible with it.

Some distros are including it for formatting prior to installation. I downloaded MX Linux to try out and it was an option when installing.

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Flash
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#4 Post by Flash »

So what's it do that FAT32 can't do?

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Subito Piano
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#5 Post by Subito Piano »

"Btrfs is intended to address the lack of pooling, snapshots, checksums, and integral multi-device spanning in Linux file systems...it offers improvements in scalability, reliability, and ease of management" Much more detailed info at the link above.

I try to avoid FAT32 -- perhaps mostly because Barry doesn't recommend it due to reliability issues. When installing Puppy, he advises against it.

Maybe some of it is just my dislike of anything Windoze-related. ;-)

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drunkjedi
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#6 Post by drunkjedi »

Open Gparted, from it's menu select show filesystem support, then note down the software written in last column in front of btrfs.

Open PPM, search and install that software.
That should do it.

I believe it's called btrfs-tools. But I don't remember correctly.

If it's not available, you may have to compile it.

I remember seeing it in Fatdog 700 repo.

But will have to check again.

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bigpup
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#7 Post by bigpup »

Installed btrfs tools.
That gets support into Gparted, but I wonder how other specific Puppy programs will handle it?
Only way to find out is try it, in a Puppy, after you install btrfs tools.
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#8 Post by Subito Piano »

Thanks -- I' ll play with it later today/tomorrow and post back.

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#9 Post by BarryK »

I wrote about btrfs recently on my blog:

http://barryk.org/news/?viewDetailed=00453

Apart from the running-out-of-memory thing, it looks good.
[url]https://bkhome.org/news/[/url]

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#10 Post by Burn_IT »

So it looks nice, but doesn't work (consistently)??
"Just think of it as leaving early to avoid the rush" - T Pratchett

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#11 Post by Subito Piano »

Installing BTRFS-tools let me work with a BTRFS partition but not install Puppy to it. It's a moot point after reading Barry's post, though...i don't need more headaches.

Barry, if you see this -- THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU again for your labor of "Puppy love." I've used it for a long time and it's become my OS/Distro of choice.

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Wyk72
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#12 Post by Wyk72 »

I've been using BTRFS for quite some time in my ubuntu setups, it has proven to be a really good "swiss knife" FS that includes advanced features, like RAID, snapshots, compression etc.

I've been reading in the BTRFS wiki that with kernel 4.15:

Overlayfs can now use btrfs as the lower filesystem.

I don't know if it is of any relevance to Puppy development, but maybe the init script can now be modified to include BTRFS support to puppy ? Any benefits/drawbacks ? Worth it ?

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rufwoof
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#13 Post by rufwoof »

Found this thread after posting this http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 01#1028501 ... so for cross reference purposes I've liked that posting to here.

btrfs inside a file filesystem (i.e. store/use it on/from a ext2/3/4, NTFS .. etc.).
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#14 Post by rufwoof »

Here's another basic outline of using btrfs, but this time using a file filesystem (that can be stored on fat, ext, ntfs ... similar to a save-file). I used Fatdog to check the following commands, Fatdog comes already prepared for btrfs (cat /proc/filesystems indicates btrfs as a supported filesystem, and btrfs-tools are already installed by default).

# Create a 1GB image file (file filesystem)
# I'm using my sdb1 ext3 partition here mounted to /mnt/sdb1

cd /mnt/sdb1
mkdir btrfs
cd btrfs
dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/sdb1/btrfs/btrfs.img bs=4096 count=262144

# format it to btrfs
mkfs.btrfs /mnt/sdb1/btrfs/btrfs.img

# Mount it
mkdir -p /mnt/btrfs
mount /mnt/sdb1/btrfs/btrfs.img /mnt/btrfs

# create a btrfs sub volume using
btrfs subvolume create /mnt/btrfs/vol1

# and umount that top level view
umount /mnt/btrfs

# and mount the sub-volume instead
mount -o subvol=vol1 /mnt/sdb1/btrfs/btrfs.img /mnt/btrfs

# .. create a file on that
echo hi >/mnt/btrfs/hello.txt
# ... check it was created
ls /mnt/btrfs/*

# To create a snapshot of that we umount the sub volume, mount the image and ....
umount /mnt/btrfs
mount btrfs.img /mnt/btrfs
btrfs subvolume snapshot /mnt/btrfs/vol1 /mnt/btrfs/vol1-snapshot
umount /mnt/btrfs

# Now you can mount either the original version vol1
mount -o subvol=vol1 /mnt/sdb1/btrfs/btrfs.img /mnt/btrfs
# or its snapshot vol1-snapshot
mount -o subvol=vol1-snapshot /mnt/sdb1/btrfs/btrfs.img /mnt/btrfs

# mount one or the other as above and add/remove files as desired
# you can use a similar approach to create additional snapshots
# fundamentally we're just umount'ing and mount'ing versions as desired

# To remove a snapshot
umount /mnt/btrfs
mount /mnt/sdb1/btrfs/btrfs.img /mnt/btrfs
btrfs subvolume delete vol1-snapshot

# To list available sub-volumes we use the subvolume list command ...
umount /mnt/btrfs
mount /mnt/sdb1/btrfs/btrfs.img /mnt/btrfs
btrfs subvolume list /mnt/btrfs
ID 256 gen 15 top level 5 path vol1
ID 257 gen 13 top level 5 path vol1-snapshot


You could for example create a sub-volume vol1 as above, perhaps load (copy) a entire base puppy filesystem into that, then create a snapshot, perhaps using a name of vol1-basesystem, and then perhaps load a sfs by unsquashing the sfs
unsquashfs -f -d /mnt/btrfs libreoffice.sfs
and perhaps make a snapshot of that with perhaps a name of vol1-libreoffice. You'd then have vol1, vol1-basesystem and vol1-libreoffice with libreoffice also installed. Along with the vol1-snapshot we also created earlier. Not needing all of those we might opt to remove the vol1 and vol1-snapshot snapshots to leave just vol1-basesystem and vol1-libreoffice volumes/snapshots.

We might then create a snapshot of the vol1-libreoffice volume/snapshot as vol1-libreoffice-snapshot ... and then mount/use that, and afterwards remove it ... or whatever.

PS Why the apparent odd choice of dd blocksize and count (bs=4096 count=262144) ... well 4096 byte blocks are squashfs minimum but nbd (network block device) maximum and is a nice round number of 4 times 1024 bytes where 1024 byte blocks tends to sit well with ethernet. So somewhat a 'better' choice than any, rather than good a choice as any.
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[size=75][url=https://hashbang.sh]echo url|sed -e 's/^/(c/' -e 's/$/ hashbang.sh)/'|sh[/url][/size]

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