[HN Gopher] Windows on Btrfs
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Windows on Btrfs
Author : susam
Score : 110 points
Date : 2023-04-21 21:08 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lilysthings.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lilysthings.org)
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Haha wow that is so ridiculous it's awesome. Seeing both the
| Linux root and Windows root with Program Files living right next
| to usr, etc. is _wild_. Very cool hack!
| chmod775 wrote:
| Given there's now native NTFS support in the Linux kernel, you
| could also do that that the other way around.
| biorach wrote:
| I highly recommend the Windows BTRFS driver.
| remram wrote:
| Recommend it for what?
| speed_spread wrote:
| Too bad the article doesn't talk about performance vs NTFS. Any
| quick and dirty comparative benchmark would have been nice. But
| then again, If BTRFS had been slower than NTFS it could have been
| due to a suboptimal (re)implementation.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I think nothing these days can perform worse than NTFS. I've
| been using Windows on my corporate issue laptop and anything
| that includes disk IO is a huge pain.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Some amount of that might be coming from Windows Defender and
| similar, but yeah NTFS isn't exactly a speed demon.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| Nothing particularly wrong with NTFS, it's Windows
| filesystem architecture that is slow.
| solarkraft wrote:
| I can't find it right now, but I believe there was a talk
| from a Rust maintainer a while ago about the Rust
| installation being way slower than it should be, which
| was almost entirely a rant on Windows file system
| performance.
| ygra wrote:
| That one perhaps?
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbKGw8MQ0i8
|
| I don't recall it particularly ranty, though.
| Dwedit wrote:
| So how reliable is this and how long will it take before you get
| a badly corrupted disk?
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| Speaking of Windows storage drivers, years ago, I managed to get
| Windows to boot and run entirely in RAM using some fairly obscure
| tools from the reboot.pro forums. I always wanted to have an
| immutable Windows system that I could manage like cattle.
| Unfortunately, setting up such a system was extremely complicated
| and a manual process. I am aware that Windows now has a driver
| called UWF that functions a bit like an overlay filesystem and
| can create ephemeral overlays, but it's not quite the same as
| booting and running in RAM. It's also only available in
| Enterprise unless you enable it via registry edits.
| nwellinghoff wrote:
| Awesome. Would love to see some performance marks.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| Nobody asked for this, wanted this, or imagined it. But it was
| done and it is epic! A tip of my hat!
| LukeShu wrote:
| I'm intending to write up some docs and announce it in the next
| few days, but since this thread is here, I might as well mention
| it now:
|
| On the topic of alternative btrfs implementations, I've been
| working on https://git.lukeshu.com/btrfs-progs-ng/ which is
| written entirely in Go.
|
| Its `btrfs-rec inspect mount --pv=/dev/whatever` is a read-only
| FUSE implementation of btrfs that is more fault-tolerant (of
| corrupt filesystems) than the normal in-kernel btrfs driver (and
| even more tolerant than `btrfs rescue` or `btrfs recover`).
|
| It's still missing a bit; RAID almost certainly doesn't work, and
| encryption is not implemented. But hopefully some folks will find
| it useful, or at least neat!
|
| Oh, comparison with the existing
| https://github.com/adam900710/btrfs-fuse : (1) Again, mine has
| better fault tolerance, (2) but mine is read-only, (3) mine
| supports xattrs (TODO in Adam's), (4) mine supports separate
| inode address spaces for subvolumes (Adam's doesn't due to
| limitations in FUSE, mine works around this by lazily setting up
| separate mountpoints for each subvolume).
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Interesting, I would've expected more Windows software to just
| assume NTFS with some fallbacks for (ex)fat given how there
| haven't really been any other options for quite some time.
|
| How stable is Btrfs these days? Remember reading years ago that
| it was bad about spontaneously corrupting itself for no apparent
| reason.
|
| Curious if something similar is possible with ZFS.
| LukeShu wrote:
| IMO, it became stable somewhere between 2013 and 2016. I
| definitely haven't had any spontaneous corruption since at
| least 2016 (on multiple laptops and servers; btrfs volumes that
| mid-double-digit of terabytes)
|
| That said,
|
| - My BDB and SQLite databases tend to corrupt if my laptop
| battery dies and they're on a volume that's not on LUKS.
|
| - `btrfs check` (fsck), `btrfs rescue`, and `btrfs restore` are
| IMO not up to snuff if you do encounter corruption (caused by
| something else, like a failing drive). (But I'm working on that
| https://git.lukeshu.com/btrfs-progs-ng/ !)
|
| - `docker build` is weirdly slow on btrfs, I always set up a
| separate ext4 `/var/lib/docker` volume.
|
| - I do RAID and encryption separately in MD or LVM and LUKS, so
| no comments from me about the stability of btrfs' built-in RAID
| cor encryption.
| Slix wrote:
| > `docker build` is weirdly slow on btrfs, I always set up a
| separate ext4 `/var/lib/docker` volume.
|
| I'm currently doing this for a different reason. My docker
| builds started failing after some Ubuntu upgrade. I gave up
| and used ext4 for that docker directory to fix everything.
| https://serverfault.com/q/1127148
|
| It unsettled me because now I'm not sure whether btrfs (or
| docker with btrfs) is production-ready.
| LukeShu wrote:
| Docker has 8 different storage drivers that it can use...
| that's a lot, so you _know_ they don 't all get equal
| attention. As much as I love btrfs, it's probably fair to
| say that the only Docker storage driver that receives
| adequate attention to be production-ready is "overlay2".
|
| https://docs.docker.com/storage/storagedriver/select-
| storage...
| jdhendrickson wrote:
| Any ideas on what causes the docker issue? Or have you not
| poked it with a stick yet?
| LukeShu wrote:
| I haven't had a chance to dig in to it yet. Most of the
| time, Docker uses `overlayfs` to emulate COW, but on btrfs
| it can just use the filesystem's native COW. In my mind
| it's about equally likely that it's Docker's fault as it is
| btrfs's fault; that perhaps Docker's btrfs storage driver
| is doing something dumb.
|
| https://docs.docker.com/storage/storagedriver/select-
| storage...
| pxc wrote:
| For VMs and containers isn't it pretty common to use a
| subvol where CoW is disabled for their disk images? Same
| thing for ZFS with datasets that disabled CoW for things
| like that.
| yyyk wrote:
| Well, there's ReFS as well. That experience suggests there are
| issues that the author might come up against following boot:
| Case insensitive lookup (NTFS has the option for case sensitive
| subdirectories but that probably doesn't matter), Mark of the
| Web/SQL Server (Alternate data streams support), UWP/Microsoft
| Store apps support (IIRC requires FS encryption support via a
| specific interface), DLT (Object IDs), getting DISM to work for
| updates... It's cool to get this far, full support will
| probably need a bit more work.
| pxc wrote:
| There's a ZFS port for Windows but I don't think using it on
| the boot volume is supported. You could definitely try it,
| though!
| curt15 wrote:
| >How stable is Btrfs these days? Remember reading years ago
| that it was bad about spontaneously corrupting itself for no
| apparent reason.
|
| On one hand, Fedora and SUSE default to Btrfs. On the other
| hand, data corruption bugs are still being unearthed [1]:
|
| [1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2169947.
| Arnavion wrote:
| FWIW I've been using btrfs for the root partition for a
| decade without any (observed) corruption problems. This is
| across multiple installs of OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on laptops
| and PCs, HDDs and SSDs and most recently an SD card. Back in
| the day it needed manual intervention to rebalance but that
| is automated now. Also, OpenSUSE's update program
| automatically takes pre- and post- snapshots, and these
| snapshots have saved me a lot of headache from botched
| upgrades.
| solarkraft wrote:
| Same here. Never had to do anything, with the notable
| exception of it being somewhat annoying to recover when the
| disk is full (which is why I've started to keep subvolumes
| that I can quickly delete).
|
| But I'm not running a RAID, which I believe is where almost
| all of the data corruption has happened.
| nailer wrote:
| File systems are drivers and user space software shouldn't
| really see the difference.
| LanternLight83 wrote:
| It's really matured, and although the RAID5/6 Write Hole still
| exists, I wouldn't reccomend a ZDEV over RAID10 either, which
| is what I believe offers the best tradeoffs for most users on
| both filesystems. Love the flexibility that BTRFS provides via
| eg. the balance comand, and Snapper is great for snapshot
| management.
| skanga wrote:
| Can someone please explain the advantages of doing this?
| rbanffy wrote:
| It forces you to understand how Windows functions on unexpected
| conditions and that knowledge can be extrapolated to other
| situations where something on Windows fails for no apparent
| reason and you just know it because you saw it before.
|
| Do not underestimate the power of arcane knowledge.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Step one: Include Linux kernel in Windows.
|
| Step two: Include Linux filesystem in Windows.
|
| Step three: Windows is Linux.
| dgunay wrote:
| During my transition period from Windows to Linux, I stored the
| majority of my games on my NTFS drive because it was much
| bigger and I wanted them available on Windows in case they
| didn't work on Proton. I could play them from Linux with
| ntfs-3g but some of them would just refuse to launch unless I
| moved them a non-NTFS drive. Maybe they would've worked in this
| scenario? Hard to say.
| xaduha wrote:
| This is a science experiment.
| solarkraft wrote:
| Less Microsoft-centric stuff on your computer.
|
| btrfs is pretty comfortable to manage, too.
|
| On that point: I wonder how the subvolume experience is.
| seiferteric wrote:
| Actually I have been looking for just this for several years,
| even as recently as a few weeks ago I was looking, but only
| found some commercial btrfs driver. The idea of unified storage
| is really nice, you don't have to decide how much each OS gets,
| and with btrfs you can just plop in another drive and extend
| onto it to transparently increase storage capacity. On top of
| that, tings like duplicating steam game assets would probably
| be a big win.
| csdvrx wrote:
| Why keep different filesystems outside of specific performance
| needs? I've experimented with weirder things, like Linux
| running on NTFS with the new kernel driver.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Linux running on NTFS with the new kernel driver.
|
| As the root file system? Does that work?
| solarkraft wrote:
| Pretty cool, apart from the fact that it's Windows you're
| booting.
|
| But what's up with UWP apps not working?
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| This is really cool and speaks to the modularity of the Windows
| file system stack. I love projects that customize Windows
| (working against its closed-source nature).
|
| There's an OpenZFS port to Windows[0]. I wonder if my hopes of
| having ZFS on Windows (including the boot drive, because I would
| love to be able to snapshot and rollback) would actually be
| possible.
|
| [0] https://github.com/openzfsonwindows/openzfs
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| I am sure this will break the second time you run Windows Update.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > I am sure this will break the second time you run Windows
| Update.
|
| Then you are confidently wrong, because Windows Update rarely
| (if ever) touches the bootloader, while this is the main
| innovation of the WinBTRFS project.
| easton wrote:
| I wouldn't be so sure, Windows is famously annoying to goof
| with the boot loader on from a running install. You usually
| need to boot from another system to fix/reinstall it (at least,
| you did last time I needed to bring back the Windows bootloader
| on a borked dual boot).
|
| Although, since UWP doesn't work it's a moot point, that means
| you probably can't run Windows Update.
| nailer wrote:
| Whoa. So why didn't the Windows store work? Some kind of trusted
| environment thing?
| rbanffy wrote:
| A more sensible approach would be to have a separate data volume
| to store important stuff on and leave it as BtrFS while letting
| Windows and Windows software run off NTFS.
|
| But, then, what'd be the fun of having a computer you don't need
| to fix?
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(page generated 2023-04-21 23:00 UTC)