Alcun Atirutan BBS

welp btrfs fucked me again, my disk ran out of space and it remounted readonly and won't repair

@Moon gotta mount as read write and delete some stuff

@sjw piece of shit won't let me

@Moon Can't force it?

@sjw no. it is a bad filesystem

@Moon What about ZFS for cheap snapshots?

@sjw I'm gonna stick with ext4 from now on.

@Moon XFS is better

@sjw I want the most boring thing available.

@Moon @sjw We very much switched to XFS at work. I think Dave Chinner fixed up everything that was wrong with it. I run XFS everywhere at home, including this laptop. So I would not be using ext4 anymore.

@pro @sjw does it still suffer catastrophic data damage with power loss

@Moon I never had myself, nor I heard of our customers suffer the kind of data loss you had with XFS. I think the biggest factor is actually the device. If it lies about what's written and what's not, bad thing can happen, to which ext4 is more tolerant. Its jbd syncs at the device level more often. The sad part is that there's basically no way to tell what you're getting in a system unless it's a server on which OEM supports RHEL (or Ubuntu LTS).

In addition, although it's not a catastrophic data loss, it's possible to write apps that end with zero-sized files on a crash. In XFS they have to fsync. This was a big deal with Mozilla Firefox some 5 or 7 years ago, and it was happening in Swift. We even have a special daemon that finds zero-length files and quarantines them. Dave always maintained that we're just buggy and the zero-size files never appear if the application syncs and closes in the right order. We fixed Swift up for that, but left the zero-size scan in place just in case. I think it pretty much does nothing nowadays.

@sjw

@Moon Wow, I've never had that happen with btrfs, but I haven't used it as extensively as zfs. How about adding a device to the file system so that it has more space to expand out to?

@kazriko that is how I've fixed it before. I got lucky and a reboot fscked it and let me move files.