On Feb 24, 2023, at 09:31, John Mellor <john.mellor(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Ok, I'm anticipating a firestorm of BS responses on this, but here goes anyway.
Nice. So you can casually disregard any comment right away. Clever.
We've now had BTRFS as the default filesystem for some time in
Fedora. However, there has been almost nothing done to take advantage of its
capabilities. This leads to some obvious questions about future work:
1) When are we going to see removal of the EXT2 /boot partition? It is no longer
required, as the boot process has been able to use BTRFS for years now.
I believe there have been issues with this, such as the relative size of the btrfs grub2
module making it difficult to fit in the MBR blocks used as a first stage bootloader. (You
need enough code to find the kernel and initrd) Not an issue with UEFI as far as I know,
although you’ll still need a separate fat32 volume for that.
I think the issue has to do with the kernel update tools, but I haven’t followed the
tickets.
2) When are we going to see timeshifting tools built into the
desktop, ala Solaris? That's incredibly useful for developers.
No idea what that is. I know there are tools that use the name timeshidt that auto-create
snapshots during updates, but you need specific volume names and Fedora doesn’t do that.
3) The existing Windows-like update mechanism is undesirable. It
solves a non-existent problem on filesystems with inodes. Like all Unix-like systems, even
Ubuntu does not require this. The ability to snapshot means that the weird reasoning that
requires 2 reboots to install virtually all update packages is no longer required under
any circumstances. When is the software update mechanism getting a fundamental redesign?
Not a windows user, so I have no idea what you’re talking about there. It seems that
people call something “windows-like” when they don’t like it, even if it has no passing
resemblance. (Such as how people called systemd windows like!?!)
I assume you’re talking about the offline update that Fedora uses? I’ve found it
absolutely necessary, since many GNOME components (and other DEs) can crash when libraries
update under them.
However, there is absolutely an atomic update process very similar to what you are asking
about. I suggest looking into Silverblue (GNOME) and Kinoite (KDE).
4) When is a standard backup mechanism that takes advantage of
snapshotting going to be in the distro? The published backup packages do not seem to be
aware of the better capabilities available in BTRFS. Wrapping a few CLI tools in a GUI
seems like it should be obvious, maybe 200 lines of shellscript or less.
I’m not sure which backup tools you’re talking about. Deja-dup is a user space backup tool
and not suited for snapshot backup. And btrfs has it’s own equivalent of dump/restore.
Without an effective built in encryption, using ‘btrfs send‘ to store offsite backups will
require some other tools to protect the data. So for now, we use the user space backup
tools.
5) If you encrypt your filesystems, the BTRFS built-in encryption
mechanism is not used. Why not? LUKS is still in use, even though that is more
complicated and slower. I note the possible ability to encrypt being added if F38, but it
seems like baby steps when a general solution is already in the code.
You are mistaken if you think that btrfs has built in encryption. Maybe soon. I look
forward to when it is upstreamed into the kernel.
6) Compression is not the default. Why not? SSDs are 10x slower and
disks are 100x slower than the processors of even 10 years ago, so this omission is
slowing the system down.
Fortunately this can be added after the fact. I’m not sure it makes sense for everyone to
have compression enabled by default. It would likely have a performance impact in some
cases and people would yell and scream if it was enabled everywhere. Perhaps a knob to
enable it in the installer?
7) Keep the last 3 update snapshots, not just the last 3 kernels.
This would keep backout scenarios a lot more consistent and functional.
This seems like the same point as the second point about snapshots. Look into silverblue,
seriously.
--
Jonathan Billings