Re: User experience issue on btrfs

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On Sun, 2020-06-28 at 09:36 -0600, Chris Murphy wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 28, 2020 at 9:04 AM <alexandrebfarias@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Do you recall what mount options you were using? In particular this
> sounds like a side effect of using the discard mount option with
> certain SSDs. This is a significant motivation of the new
> discard=async mount option for btrfs since kernel 5.6.
> 
> Each file system's discard behavior is different. XFS has gone
> through
> a few iterations.

At first, I used the Fedora defaults. 
Whilst troubleshooting, I did use the discard mount option for some
time.
Eventually, I came to understand that having discard as a mount option
was a bad idea and kept only defaults,noatime

I'm not sure exactly on what would be the best way to measure the
performance impact, but I could probably just recreate a BTRFS
partition on the same drive and clone my system back to it and run some
tests.

What makes me worried is that I'm not sure whether most users would go
through such pains to make Fedora work. Since BTRFS was a supported
option, I just went with it and had no idea of the caveats. The live
USB seemed so polished, was very surprised that optimus support with
nouveau came out of the box and I could launch applications on my
dedicated video. 

It's not immediately obvious just how significant the BTRFS caveats are
and it may be desirable to set chattr +C. I had to do quite a bit of
research even to trace the problem back to BTRFS. And also, there needs
to be improvement to the TLP package: I blindly installed it and didn't
know that certain options were needed in order to prevent data loss
(eventually just got rid of TLP because I figured out it was useless,
but the point is that there are quite a few badly documented caveats
that need to be very clear on the Fedora documentation). Maybe I
wouldn't have known of potential issues if it were not for the Arch
Linux wiki and, well, documentation is always an issue for free/open
soruce software, but in this case I feel there are some quite serious
blocker issues.

At this point, I think that even as a supported option, there are user
experience aspects to be fixed. Even with old text installers 10 years
ago, one could basically choose any of the filesystem options offered,
even more exotic ones such as JFS (even XFS at some point when it
wasn't as well tested). Maybe you would get some performance impact,
but nothing that would completely compromise the UX.

With the kind of workload I'm talking about, it's not too far fetched
to imagine someone learning JS/TS/ECMAScript as their first programming
language and installing Fedora as their first Linux distribution, only
to have a horrific experience. This is potentially the kind of issue
that gives Linux such a bad-mouthed reputation as a desktop system. 


-- 
Alexandre de Farias
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