Tue, 16 Feb 2016 23:21:53 GMT
External Content not shown. Further Information.
I've tried BTRFS before, and it was very unstable. Now that it is in the mainline kernel, I decided to give it another shot.
The main reason was online compression. My personal chat log files are
larger than 4G now, when uncompressed, but they are very repetitive
and therefore compress well. I could have written some
logrotate(8) script. This is the common suggestion, especially on
the Raspberry Pi, on which "every processor cycle is
precious". The Raspberry Pi is 21 times faster than my first computer,
and has 262144 times as much RAM, and had
online compression. Honestly, this is 2016, not 1992.
The only filesystem from the standard packages of Raspbian that supports compression is NTFS. Reiser4 is also available and supports compression, but the snapshot facility of BTRFS convinced me. (Unfortunately, ZFS is not supported.)
On my raspi, since then, it works great. On my PC, I tried to convert an ext4 partition into BTRFS. Don't do that, at least not before doing a backup. However, now it works. And it runs faster than ext4, at least it feels like that.