Understanding Sailfish storage consumption
 

Hi,
Waiting for the new update notification, I've taken a look at my storage and I'm doubtful!

My Jolla says I consume 4.6 GB...but I wonder where.

I've Here Maps installed with the full France map which eats 1.3 GB (with Hi-Fi voice). Space Inspector says my home is 1.5 GB which is consistent as home contains the map.

So, where are the remaining 3.3 GB?

Thanks.

Re: Understanding Sailfish storage consumption
 

Well, check space inspector..........
Whole MER System also uses space...

Re: Understanding Sailfish storage consumption
 

Yes, I know, but what's why you see only 13,7 GB of storage and not 16, no? So, i assume these 4.6 are eaten from those global 13,7 GB space. Am I wrong?

Re: Understanding Sailfish storage consumption
 

You are wrong, because 16 GB are 14.901161193848 GiB, difference to 13,7 should be due to other subvolumes and maybe filesystem overhead (but not sure about that as I know too less about BTRFS).

Re: Understanding Sailfish storage consumption
 

Perfect, thanks a lot, I'm now a bit less stupid :-D

Re: Understanding Sailfish storage consumption
 

if you take backups, that almost duplicates the occupied space, check ~nemo/.vault although you should avoid manually changing files there.

personally, I have an sd card and periodically move media (music, picture, videos) from the user directory to the sd card.

Re: Understanding Sailfish storage consumption
 

Not sure that's quite accurate.

Either Jolla are using the JEDEC consortium's nomenclature, in which case 1GB = 1GiB, and therefore we have a difference of 2.3GiB

Or they are using IEC, which means that the the 13.7GB figure quoted would then represent 12.76GiB - so there's a 2.2GiB difference.

In either case we find over 2GiB is being used up by the OS/firmware and is unavailable to users.

Re: Understanding Sailfish storage consumption
 

You forgot the other subvolumes.

Re: Understanding Sailfish storage consumption
 

Plus you all forgot that with btrfs there's no objective measure of "free space" nor of "used space". There's space until ENOSPC, and that's it. Full stop.

Re: Understanding Sailfish storage consumption
 

Ok, but in real English for an average user, what does this mean?

Re: Understanding Sailfish storage consumption
 

It means that btrfs is not ready for prime time. I just hope the Jolla guys know what they are doing.

Re: Understanding Sailfish storage consumption
 

This might be a silly question, but can I not just reformat my Jolla with something more sensible?

Re: Understanding Sailfish storage consumption
 

In retrospect (which is always easy), I don't think it was the right decision. I'm not sure what else could have been done to get restore working in the timeframe that was available, but the number of headaches directly or circumstantially that can be attributed to the filesystem are pretty huge.

There's less of them now (after a metric assload of backported patches, AIUI) but I'm pretty sure it's still non-zero (see https://github.com/nemomobile/libcom...a02b61a74a3192 for one such recent example that I'm pretty sure was exacerbated by FS issues..)

Re: Understanding Sailfish storage consumption
 

is there any glimmer of hope that btrfs will be removed in the future? :(

Re: Understanding Sailfish storage consumption
 

No.​​​​​​​

Re: Understanding Sailfish storage consumption
 

What about LVM with EXT on top? The good old HP TouchPad used it back in the day without issues, so it is not like if was totally untried in the mobile space. :) Especially LVM thin pool would get you basically the same COW snapshot functionality as in btrfs, with the important difference of being rock solid, stable and generally sane. :)

Re: Understanding Sailfish storage consumption
 

Is it already known if the tablet will use btrfs too? I hope not.

I already had to rebalance my filesystem twice, with never more than 7 gigabytes of space actually used on my Jolla phone. And since there's no warning whatsoever that the allocation space is going to be full, I had to add a "btrfs fi show" to my maintenance routine (which is not that painful to do, but still, I would like to not have to do it).

Re: Understanding Sailfish storage consumption
 

Recently suse and suse enterprise got brtfs and a couple other distros the most awsome thing i found is snapshots going back to previous versions is a breeze .

Re: Understanding Sailfish storage consumption
 

I have not a problem with btrfs per se, it is its use in mobile: on a pc you can make the system auto-perform balance operations, on mobile less easy so for battery management issues etc., and the limited amount of space makes it easier to run out of allocation space.

Re: Understanding Sailfish storage consumption
 

Let's not be too fatalistic: surely mostly this is fixable, either by patching BTRFS / the kernel, or perhaps by writing a daemon or something that runs a balance every month or so when the phone is plugged in during the night...

edit - e.g. pop up a notification at 2am saying: 'Performing file system maintenance in 1 hour. Dismiss this notification to cancel.'

Re: Understanding Sailfish storage consumption
 

Yes MikeHG I think the popup in the middle of the night is good idea and will work for most people.
I'd also like a check before update install (btrfs fi df / btrfs fi show / type stuff) so users have less risk of having an update go wrong.

btrfs was very sexy (and still is in ways) so I can see why they picked it with snapshots automatic ssd detection, compression etc. we just know better now but can't do much about it except perhaps on a future device. I like the idea of LVM with EXT mentioned above very well understood and stable.

Re: Understanding Sailfish storage consumption
 

I get the impression a lot of the problems stem from a) old version of BTRFS, and b) relatively small flash chip in the phone. It seems to be a theme with next generation filesystems - ZFS is said to fall to pieces on anything less than 50GB.

Newer kernels and Moore's Law to the rescue: these problems might well disappear in future devices, effectively (cold comfort for us, maybe ;) )

Re: Understanding Sailfish storage consumption
 

Well, there are a few things to note about OpenSUSE and btrfs:

• they are actually only using it on rootfs, home is still EXT4 AFAIK
• the set of officiall supported btrfs features (at least in SLES) is actually quite limited
• people already seem to be already reporting various issues with btrfs

Re: Understanding Sailfish storage consumption
 

Guys,
I really appreciate all technical tips about btrfs and related stuff. But really, could someone explain where are my 3.3 GB gone (first message of this thread)? Is Morpog right?

Thanks and Merry Christmas to everybody !

Re: Understanding Sailfish storage consumption
 

http://abload.de/img/29074960mqsqj.jpg

:D