What is it?
BTRFS is a modern file system that is available on Linux gaining more traction in general-purpose distributions. It has become mature and stable and should be considered an option for IPFire users, too.
Who is working on it?
- Stefan Schantl
Current Status
- Targeted Release: N/A
- Tracker Bug: #13606
- Testing Images
Description
The works mainly touch the installer program which has to create a new filesystem and configure the system accordingly. Slight changes need to be made in the core system to make easy booting into snapshots possible.
Benefits to IPFire
A strict filesystem layout has become a problem on IPFire as the distribution is fast-changing. BTRFS allows more flexibility around this and brings modern filesystem features to IPFire, too.
- Instant snapshots due to COW
- Checksummed filesystems
- Compressed filesystems for better use of physical space
Impact
- Users cannot migrate to a different filesystems, so a re-installation is needed to gain this functionality. To existing systems there is no impact expected.
Documentation
Feedback
None, yet.
Dependencies
None.
Release Notes
Initial BTRFS support will be part of the upcomming Core 186 update.
This mainly will allow to choose BTRFS as filesystem when doing a fresh installation of IPFire.
All the partitioning and creation of necessary subvolumes will be done by the installer. Please note that when using BTRFS the partition layout will be a bit different than when using any other filesystem, because there is no separate partition for boot anymore. We enabled the compress feature of BTRFS, which transparently compresses files when writing to disk with zstd and therefore will save some space.
Besides this basic support there are currently no further BTRFS features like snapshotting etc implemented. They will be implemented step-by-step by the next core updates. Because development is not finished yet, we currently marked using BTRFS as filesystem as experimental.