I recently switched from EXT4 to BTRFS and my subjective impression is a dramatic improvement in Qubes OS performance. However I am not 100% sure which of the following three factors is to credit or if it is a combination of all of these:
it’s a new install with restored backup (not much fragmentation, snapshots etc. yet)
I also exchanged the SSD from a QVO to a PRO (should explain some of the improvement)
switch to BTRFS
There is an overall performance improvement, which I am ready to explain with 1) and 2), but there is a dramatic improvement when shutting down a large (100 GB) HVM and when starting a Qubes Backup from a 30+ seconds delay to literally nothing.
I am wondering if there are some folks around here, who know more about BTRFS and can explain a bit why it would improve these situations. My guess is that it has something to do with snapshots, lazy writes, etc. But I would love to hear from an expert.
That’s probably because the Qubes backup system frontloads the export() of every volume object.
In other words, at the beginning the backup system queries every relevant volume (the private volume of every included AppVM, and the private+root volumes of every included TemplateVM/StandaloneVM) asking “gimme a file name from which to read the volume data”. The lvm_thin storage driver has to activate the volume first before it can be read from, by launching external lvchange -ay commands for each one. But the file-reflink storage driver (used by the Btrfs installation layout) can respond instantly because the data file exists in a readable state at all times.
That makes sense. Thank you! Do you have an idea why I don’t see the long slowdown after shutting down the large HVM? Things like qvm-ls would block for 20+ seconds in those situations.
HVM or not shouldn’t make a difference, but if the VM has a large volume then the previous delay was due to the issue @equbes linked to for sure. (Don’t miss the many issue comments in the middle that GitHub has helpfully collapsed, there’s some interesting analysis of dm-thin by iamahuman.)
Also I switched to BTRFS about two weeks ago. I am seeing the same improvements @Sven reports.
Also it seems I was corrupting my LVM system doing hard shut downs when a 600gb VM I constantly have open would prevent the system from shutting down. Now because the system actually shut downs I suspect I won’t run into an unstable system so easily.
However this is one constant error I’m seeing during shut down in the terminal and that’s a [FAILED] Stopped (with error) /dev/dm-0, maybe @rustybird knows what is causing this?
I hope this doesn’t bring back my stability issues or a failed boot directory which happened often before.
Hmm one thing that might help is doing an extra step of shutting down all your VMs ($ qvm-shutdown --all --wait, then check e.g. in the domains widget that they’re really all gone, maybe even wait a few more seconds) before you shut down the system as a whole.
Normally that should be automatic, but I suspect there’s a bug in some layer of the shutdown procedure.
This works to prevent the error. So I’ll just use this when shutting down until I gain the experience required to troubleshoot more and submit a correctly formatted bug report. For the interim, thank you!
I just installed 4.1 and intended to configure it with BTFS with my laptop/SSD but kept going round in circles.
When you accept the default partitioning you get LVM, but if I selected custom option and BTRFS it only gave an error saying it could not validate the disk configuration, and nowhere does it say why. I’m guessing that I needed to also set up the partitioning on my own but there is nothing that even gives a hint what sizes for what partition or even how many partitions I needed. I was just stuck in a loop until I gave up and went with the LVM default. I’ll have to redo it obviously but realized I needed to do some research, but before trying again I thought I would ask a question: Why do we not have an automatic option where you can just select between LVM and BTRFS as an option? Either that or the custom section should give a hint on what it needs to be successful.
I tried again and the trick is apparently is to manually delete the partitions before clicking the “Click here to create them automatically”. After doing that I was able to continue but got an exception from anaconda during the actual partitioning.
"Error: use the -f option to force overwrite of /dev/mapper/luks-{big hex number} "
Since I don’t have a running system yet I could not copy the entire stack trace off the system. The attached photo is the top of the trace. I’ll go back and try again to see if I can get past this error somehow.
My next attempt was successful installing 4.1. with btrfs. I still have no idea what went wrong with my previous attempts other than possibly user error. In any case, this time it worked. I can’t wait to explore the new system.
collapsed, there’s some interesting analysis of dm-thin by iamahuman.)
