Lennart most recently (about a year ago) wrote on this in a mostly unrelated Fedora devel@ thread. I've found the following relevant excerpts and provide the source URL as well. BTW, we once upon a time added a TODO list item of adding a btrfs generator to systemd, similar to the existing GPT generator: it would look at the subvolumes of the root btrfs fs, and then try to mount stuff it finds if it follows a certain naming scheme. https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/message/M756KVDNY65VONU3GA5CSXB4LBJD3ZIW/ All I am asking for is to make this simple and robust and forward looking enough so that we can later add something like the generator I proposed without having to rerrange anything. i.e. make the most basic stuff self-describing now, even if the automatic discovering/mounting of other subvols doesn't happen today, or even automatic snapshotting. By doing that correctly now, you can easily extend things later incrementally without breaking stuff, just by *adding* stuff. And you gain immediate compat with "systemd-nspawn --image=" right-away as the basic minimum, which already is great. https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/message/JB2PMFPPRS4YII3Q4BMHW3V33DM2MT44/ We manage to name RPMs with versions, epochs, archs and so on, I doubt we need much more for naming subvolumes to auto-assemble. https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/message/VBVFQOG5EYI73CGFVCLMGX72IZUCQEYG/ -- Chris Murphy