Hello Stefan,

> On 15 Mar 2024, at 19:14, Stefan Schantl <stefan.schantl(a)ipfire.org> wrote:
> 
> Hello mailinglist followers,
> 
> this first patchset will introduce basic BTRFS support in IPFire 2.x.

Thank you for submitting this. I have been looking forward to see this on here.

Although it is still early days, I would like to merge this as soon as possible and generally consider this an experimental feature for a long time to come. There probably won't be any tangible advantages for our users, but we should have a better option to roll back any physical installations if any experimental updates go wrong.

> It allows to choose BTRFS during installation as filesystem, will
> install IPFire and bring it up as usual.
> 
> The main difference to the other file system will be displayed when
> showing the current mounted filesystems. When using BTRFS a lot of so
> called subvolumes will be created. They act as some kind of logical
> partition and are needed in two cases.
> 
> This kind of fragmentation allows to create snapshots of such a
> subvolume and only the stored data on it. The more important reason of
> using subvolumes is, that while creating a snapshot any files which are
> located on a different subvolume will not be part of it.
> 
> So, when creating a snaphot of the filesystem root and restoring
> it back later, no files which are part of a subvolume (logfile, database
> files etc) are rolled-back. This helps us debugging because the old logs
> are still there and mostly important prevents from data lost of altered
> databases or newly created files!
> 
> Currently there is still some work to do see:
> 
> Wiki-Roadmap: https://www.ipfire.org/docs/roadmap/btrfs
> Bugzilla: https://bugzilla.ipfire.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13606
> 
> Stefan Schantl (17):
>  btrfs-progs: New package
>  installer: Allow to install IPFire on BTRFS
>  installer: Ensure to always create the /boot directory.
>  installer: Disable seperate boot partition
>  installer: Add code to create a BTRFS subvolume layout.
>  installer: Correctly umount main BTRFS partition.
>  installer: Add recurisve mkdir function
>  installer: Mount BTRFS layout  before installing the system
>  installer: Add /var/tmp to the BTRFS layout
>  installer: Fix using BTRFS mount options when mounting the layout
>  installer: Add code to proper unmount the BTRFS layout
>  installer: Add code to correctly write the fstab when installing on
>    BTRFS
>  installer: Define common mount options for BTRFS volumes
>  inotify-tools: New package
>  grub-btrfs: New package
>  installer: Mark BTRFS support as experimental
>  installer: Adjust BTRFS layout
> 
> config/rootfiles/common/btrfs-progs         |  33 +++
> config/rootfiles/common/grub-btrfs          |  14 ++
> config/rootfiles/common/inotify-tools       |  19 ++
> config/rootfiles/common/x86_64/initscripts  |   4 +
> lfs/btrfs-progs                             |  85 ++++++++
> lfs/grub-btrfs                              |  79 +++++++
> lfs/initscripts                             |   3 +
> lfs/inotify-tools                           |  83 ++++++++
> make.sh                                     |   3 +
> src/initscripts/system/grub-btrfsd          |  61 ++++++
> src/installer/dracut-module/module-setup.sh |   4 +-
> src/installer/hw.c                          | 221 +++++++++++++++++++-
> src/installer/hw.h                          |   8 +
> src/installer/main.c                        |   1 +
> 14 files changed, 606 insertions(+), 12 deletions(-)
> create mode 100644 config/rootfiles/common/btrfs-progs
> create mode 100644 config/rootfiles/common/grub-btrfs
> create mode 100644 config/rootfiles/common/inotify-tools
> create mode 100644 lfs/btrfs-progs
> create mode 100644 lfs/grub-btrfs
> create mode 100644 lfs/inotify-tools
> create mode 100644 src/initscripts/system/grub-btrfsd
> 
> -- 
> 2.39.2
>