How is btrfs meant to be used?
 

I filled whole /dev/mmcblk0p28 on jolla and rm:ing files is not freeing space. Even rm gives "No space left on device".

How this btrfs is meant to be used? Do I really need to read everything about subvolumes, snapshotting and balancing if I want use it just like ext4?

Re: How is btrfs meant to be used?
 

If you are on a recent enough Sailfish version, you can try playing with the btrfs-balancer command, e.g. "btrfs-balancer balance" (as root...).

Otherwise, look up the older balancing instructions in jollatogether.

Please note that btrfs is worse than ext4 in almost any benchmark, and I would even say has a more stupid design, save for precisely the features you don't want (subvolumes, snapshotting, CoW). _Specially_ the completely broken version that is shipped on the Jolla kernel. Therefore, maybe you want a ext4 formatted SD card...

Re: How is btrfs meant to be used?
 

Needed: Luckily I had space for it.


-> Great.

But this is not acceptable that I (as an user) needed to do that.

Re: How is btrfs meant to be used?
 

you do not need to do that manually. the only you need is to keep your phone on charger at night, and it will balance automatically when needed.

Re: How is btrfs meant to be used?
 

Thats how it 'should' work. Not always perfect though :P
BTRFS was a stupid choice, and gives more troubles than it solves problems.
Unfortunately, it is as hard to ditch as the (in)famous Aegis

Re: How is btrfs meant to be used?
 

Actually BTRFS was a good choise and made sense when it was decided to be used. (and still does) BTRFS has good feature set that is used and needed on the device and is optimized to minimize FLASH wear.

The real problem is users cramming too much data on the device, so the more sensible choise would have been having the device with 64GB storage in the first place... :)

Totally different thing, Aegis was meant to be a barrier for users, whereas Jolla choise of FS is a blessing for you :eek:

Re: How is btrfs meant to be used?
 

I dont see how running btrfs balance every night helps ;)
I disagree with you hehe

Oh yeah! I do that :P
And +1 for more memory


Yes, different thing, same issue. Cant get rid of it easily ;)

Re: How is btrfs meant to be used?
 

imho btrfs is just because of qualcomm architecture

Re: How is btrfs meant to be used?
 

I fully agree. I mean, I would say adopting btrfs would be a risky move _today_. And Jolla adopted it years ago AND probably knew they would be stuck with their current kernel version. I'd never used btrfs in this situation!

Perhaps they're still planning to use for something more useful than factory restore (e.g. snapshots?). But I keep thinking that the factory restore usecase would best be served with recovery images...

Not sure about whether it minimizes flash wear by any measure... The feature set is nice, but is barely used by Sailfish (not a bad thing since that makes SFOS mostly FS independent). To my knowledge only factory restore uses _any_ btrfs feature!

Yeah well, I'm in the group who thinks that if the filesystem fails to handle ENOSPC (no free space error) properly, it's broken beyond repair. On Ext4, reserving around 5% of blocks/inodes ensures this problem almost never happens. On Btrfs, how many blocks you need to reserve? 83%?

Doubt it, since all the other qcom partitions are ext4...

Re: How is btrfs meant to be used?