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GRUB 1.99 Released With Support For ZFS and BtrFS
kthreadd writes "GNU GRUB has been updated to version 1.99. Among the many improvements are support for two new filesystems, BtrFS and ZFS. For Linux users this means that it's now possible to move to BtrFS entirely and not use it only for non-bootable volumes."
Ext4 is stable now, and was an easy upgrade from ext3, both in terms of development and in terms of converting your existing filesystems -- one command, and then just remount as ext4, no time-consuming and dangerous conversion needed.
BtrFS looks to be better than ext4 in every way except the above -- and I haven't been following it for awhile, so as far as I know, btrfs might be rock-solid stable by now.
Put another way, ext4 is a replacement for ext3, whereas btrfs is a replacement for zfs.
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Until it supports booting from paper tape or punch card, I'm not going to trust it 100%
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I know about ZFS (somewhat), but what's the big appeal of Ext4 and BtrFS ? Cool that Grub can boot from them, but do they confer any tangible benefits for desktop users ?
For personal use, I care about two things:
1. How safe is my data
2. How quickly can I access it
Ext3 seems to address both concerns quite acceptably, so what do these newer filesystems do better ? And why would anyone want to use that on their boot partition ?
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With GRUB ~= 2.0, you aren't supposed to mess with grub.conf. You're supposed to mess with a shitpile of external .conf files and command line tools.
I like having the ability to wipe out and redo any partition without ruining my ability to boot into my other partitions. I typically multi-boot 3 or 4 partitions so this matters to me.
So I always use an independent boot manager like GAG or PLOP that can boot just about anything else and is drop dead simple to reconfigure. Each partition gets it's own favorite PARTITION boot manager, Grub for Linux, BCD for Windows, etc...
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BtrFS can upgrade in place as well, and even better it can leave the old file system meta data intact so until you commit the snapshot you can even down grade back to ext2/3 if you like; but you'd loose any other changes made to the file system since the switch to BtrFS as well.
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Put another way, ext4 is a replacement for ext3, whereas btrfs is a replacement for zfs.
I think you mean that btrfs is a replacement for ext4. Maybe I'm naive and a bit reactionary but I'm just not seeing FreeBSD and Solaris switching to btrfs just because the Linux crowd says it's the greatest thing since sliced bread...
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"In 2008 the principal developer of the ext3 and ext4 file systems, Theodore Ts'o, stated that ext4 is a stop-gap and that Btrfs is the way forward,[10] having "a number of the same design ideas that reiser3/4 had". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs & http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/8/1/217
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I actually stopped building my own kernels around the time that everyone switched over to grub. I wish I could remember what specifically caused my problem, but I do remember running grub-install over and over, grub swearing up and down that it was installed and read my config, then rebooting and getting nothing. I'm pretty sure this was before I did root on raid/luks/lvm too.
I don't even mind when things break all that much. It can be fun to track down the problem and fix it. Grub is just inscrutable, it gave me no information to help troubleshoot, and I couldn't get any help from the Grub IRC.
The only problem I've ever had with it was PEBKAC: I upgraded the kernel and purged the old one, but didn't let the Grub updater run. A quick boot with a live CD let me edit the conf file and all was good.
The funny thing is, you had to do the same thing with LILO. If you didn't rerun 'lilo' after editing its configuration, it wouldn't boot. The big selling point of Grub was that you didn't have to do this. Grub will figure everything out they said. That didn't quite work out.
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At what point does GRUB become more of an OS than a bootloader? Adding multiple file system support seems odd. I understand the reason, but in principle you want the boot loader to be small, not constantly incorporating operating system features. Is there some problem with having a small boot partition that can only be formatted one way? The same issue happened with X.org where it gained memory management, font handling, etc - lots of stuff beyond just being a window system. The same also happened with MESA when it started getting hardware acceleration (for a soft implementation of OpenGL). The same feature creep is also happening with BIOS. Some of these projects need to define what they are and stick to that IMHO. Otherwise, we can just merge GRUB into the kernel and put the whole thing into the flash normally used for BIOS ;-) Maybe not a bad thing ( I think it's bad ) but certainly not 3 distinct software components.
I certainly can't claim to have never done anything stupid. But isn't it funny how I never did anything stupid when LILO was the popular boot loader?
Sure, i'll cop to being an idiot. In fact, that's my whole point. LILO was idiot proof, Grub is not.
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If you get random file corruption on Windows, you either have serious hardware failure or use Windows 98.
I would probably switch from Ext4 to BtrFS if it had full Gparted support.
Ext4 is stable now, and was an easy upgrade from ext3, both in terms of development and in terms of converting your existing filesystems -- one command, and then just remount as ext4, no time-consuming and dangerous conversion needed.
There is a trade off most people don't realize. Ext4 allows for a safe, simple migration from ext3, but in doing so, you do not receive all of the ext4 benefits. Ext4 on disk format differs from ext3. When ext4 mounts an ext3 partition, it is limited to the constraints available of an ext3 on disk format. Otherwise, there would be no need for ext4 to have its own format. To obtain all of the ext4 performance, tweaks, and reliability benefits, you MUST perform an ext4 format.
This is really cool. Now when one of these filesystems becomes stable in Linux, we'll be ready to go. Look out 2025--here I come!
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I like BtrFS, I used to use ReiserFS, but then apparently he killed his wife or something and it pretty much killed the project. BtrFS seems to be a cool similar form of idea, but updated... like a Reiser4, but without the negative connotation...
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With GRUB you had a conf file
which is simpler?
Fixed that for you... /boot/grub/grub.cfg, an /etc/default/grub with some stuff in it and a couple of files in /etc/grub.d/
Now with grub2 you have three config files (at least in Ubuntu); a read-only
Once you change anything in one of them you have to run 'update-grub' and it'll generate the grub.cfg from the other files.
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There's no amount of "study" on my part that could make Grub as reliable as LILO. There's also no amount of study that would make LILO as featureful as Grub.
More features almost never equals better stability.
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To obtain all of the ext4 performance, tweaks, and reliability benefits, you MUST perform an ext4 format.
That's not entirely correct. With two commands, you get a full conversion from ext3 to ext4 without a reformat, leaving your data in place: /dev/DEV /dev/DEV
tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index
e2fsck -fDC0
(On an unmounted filesystem, obviously. Source. )
Way back when, when the option was xfs or ext3, not getting forced fsck after a crash was a big plus for xfs. I don't think I've ever had xfs_repair do anything.
I have a NAS box with 4x750GB RAID5 formatted ext3. The processor and I/O is so slow that it has never finished an fsck even after I've waited for two weeks since it started. That was intolerable so I hacked into it and after building xfs.ko, found that support for linux xfs on big endian processors is non-existent. So what I do now is pull the drives, put them in an x86 linux system and do the fsck there if the thing crashes. Never buy a NAS box that uses ext3.
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Perhaps it might be more accurate to say that the purpose of btrfs is to implement many zfs features in Linux which couldn't be previously... Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's for licencing reasons that Linux distros don't ship with zfs?
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