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Linux 3.6 Released
diegocg writes "Linux 3.6 has been released. It includes new features in Btrfs: subvolume quotas, quota groups and snapshot diffs (aka 'send/receive'). It also includes support for suspending to disk and memory at the same time, a TCP 'Fast Open' mode, a 'TCP small queues' feature to fight bufferbloat; support for safe swapping over NFS/NBD, better Ext4 quota support, support for the PCIe D3cold power state; and VFIO, which allows safe access from guest drivers to bare-metal host devices. Here's the full changelog."
While the new features like quota groups, snapshot diffs and tcp "fast open" are great, what's really bothering this version is its tendency to
Swap over NFS is something I've been waiting a long time for =)
there's Linux-libre.
http://linux-libre.fsfla.org/pub/linux-libre/releases/LATEST-3.6.0/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux-libre
On the and-user client side, there may not be much noticeable improvement. But on servers and/or load-balancing front ends this type of improvement could be quite significant.
This is a boring sig
I've been using btrfs on two computers for about a year now. I'd say it's quite stable. I'm using it for /home as well as a data partition, with zlib compression on /home. The snapshot feature is amazing and should be used liberally. Early on I experienced some disk corruption (mostly due to rapidly switching kernel versions 3.0, 3.2, 3.4, 3.5), which was not a problem because there existed snapshots on the disk. The primary partition can be corrupted, but if you have an uncorrupted snapshot, you can mount it. So, it's a good idea to get in the habit of making regular snapshots. I've been doing it by hand, but a daily rotating snapshots would be a great idea for reliability. There are many cron jobs, shell scripts and whatnot to accomplish this (e.g. Autosnap). Furthermore there is apt-btrfs-snapshot which on Debian/Ubuntu systems will automatically snapshot whenever upgrading/installing a package. This basically takes care of changes in /usr (and you'll need a cron job for /home). The only real drawback I've encountered is that dpkg is very slow (likely due to my use of zlib compression). But dpkg's database access has been a snail for a long time and is dpkg's problem (and I hope someone looks into this soon, it's pissing me off -- zlib just exacerbates the problem). But since apt-get upgrade can run in the background while I'm working, it doesn't really bother me.
I'm also using RAID1 on all magnetic disks (plus one SSD not in a RAID configuration). After countless disk failures, I just don't trust magnetic disks any further than I can throw them. And, they are cheap enough that two instead of one is not a huge burden. In the last year, I have not had occasion to recover from a failure due to RAID1, but I have experimented with mounting one half of the RAID1, and it operates normally. There are a few tricks to re-sync the drives when its partner is re-added to the array, that one should be aware of. It's not fully automatic. One of my RAID1 arrays is over two LVM volumes, with the left half consisting of a single 3 TB disk, and the right half consisting of three disks concatenated into a single LVM. This makes it easier to add disks later. LVM and btrfs can both resize.
A couple things to be aware of: you cannot place a swap file on a btrfs partition. So use another filesystem, a full partition, or just buy more RAM (my preferred solution). You should not use a kernel version less than 3.5. There have been many fixes between 3.0 and 3.4, and you're asking for trouble if you use btrfs on a 3.0 or 3.2 kernel. Since I installed 3.5 kernels on all my machines, I have not had any btrfs-related problems. FWIW, I regularly have to reboot because ATI's shitty video driver causes a kernel panic, sometimes via a hard reset. I have yet to see any filesystem corruption due to this. And everyone should know how to use the Magic SysRq key in the event of kernel panics too. (Alt-SysRq- REIUSB should unmount, sync, and boot, leaving filesystems in a consistent state)
I highly recommend BTRFS at this point. I'm not sure the distributions are up to noob auto-installs, but if you like to do things yourself, it offers a lot of advantages over ext4.
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
It's really quite simple. The parent and grandparent are simply implying that
There once was a man from Lahore,
whose limericks stopped at line four.
When asked why this was,
he said just because