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by lake99 3574 days ago
I've had some bad experience with btrfs. When I had to hard-reset a hung computer, some directories became unremovable and unrenameable. All else failed, and I attempted to --repair, it did so much damage that I had to reformat the disk. This was probably about 3-4 years ago. Have you had such issues on your preferred filesystems in the last couple of years?

The reason I stay with ext4 is that it has proven amazingly robust in the event of hard reboots.
1 comments
guroot 3573 days ago
In my experience XFS is rock solid. We use it almost everywhere at work. I've never had an issue with hard reboots with it. Only recently started playing with btrfs, so can't speak to it's reliability from personal experience.
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lake99 3573 days ago
I hard-reboot about once a week, caused by my carelessness and running out of 16GB of RAM. I always recommend against btrfs for system partitions, and if you don't make frequent backups, against user partitions too. Read through "man btrfsck", that should caution you sufficiently. I'll try out XFS on an external HDD I'll buy soon.
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guroot 3569 days ago
You really shouldn't need to be hard rebooting just because you ran out of ram... did you try a sysrq f (invokes the out of memory killer) first? If that doesn't work you should at least be able to force a sync and remount read-only before taking it down. If you have access to a keyboard and the kernel is still responding to sysrq you should never just hard power off without at least trying to regain control of the system.

Some reading if you're not familiar with sysrq: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key Depending on your distro you might have to enable it, I believe ubuntu (for some dumb reason) ships with emergency sync as the only command available.

Enabling it should amount to adding: kernel.sysrq=1 to /etc/sysctl.conf on older machines or editing /etc/sysctl.d/10-magic-sysrq.conf on newer ones.

also if you are running out of ram that often you might want to consider a swap partition. Or if you have one already try setting a more aggressive swapiness value.

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