[sevg]

I recently tried btrfs on a new USB thumb drive. I immediately got hard freezes of my main (Linux) OS while working with the USB stick.

Never again.

I eagerly await bcachefs reaching maturity!

[viraptor]

I hope you reported the issue. That smells like a bug beyond the scope of btrfs itself. The basic filesystem has been stable for a very long time.

[nextaccountic]

Maybe that was a bad USB port? (I have one such port that intermittently disconnects)

I have a USB stick with btrfs + LUKS on Arch Linux and it never had a problem like this

[sevg]

Same port and USB stick worked fine with XFS and ext4.

Tried again with btrfs and hard freezes again.

[Rinzler89]

>Same port and USB stick worked fine with XFS and ext4.

None of those file systems are not comparable to BTRFS since they're not COW. BTRFS isn't for crappy USB drives since it has a lot more overhead than EXT4 and XFS which the controllers and flash chips in junky USB drives can't handle.

[sevg]

It's not a crappy USB drive. It's a high-end high-performance Sandisk USB drive.

Regardless, I still expect the choice of filesystem to not hard freeze my OS.

I've had janky crappy USB drives before and with any other filesystem reads/writes might fail but I don't get a hard freeze.

One could argue it could be a bug in the Linux USB stack rather than a bug in the btrfs kernel driver. But what I do know is that when I pick btrfs I get problems.

[Rinzler89]

>It's a high-end high-performance Sandisk USB drive

That doesn't mean much. How high end? USB thumb drives are still much slower than SSDs or even HDDs.

>Regardless, I still expect the choice of filesystem to not hard freeze my OS.

That's a very particular filesystem, that's not designed for such hardware. OF course you'll run into issues. The FS expects data at a throughput that the ARM controller in the USB thumb drive can't deliver. OF course it will have issues.

[sevg]

Yeah, no.

You're overestimating how much overhead btrfs has. 500MB/s read/write is way more than it needs. I wasn't even doing any sustained writes.

In any case, I've been burned by btrfs issues on SSDs several times since 2018. Metadata issues, unrecoverable problems, corruption.

If you're ok with a filesystem causing hard freezes, then all power to you.

Not me. In my world, a filesystem that has this many issues is not a filesystem I want to use.

Edit: Can't reply to your reply. So here will do. Irrelevant how fast the USB is. If the filesystem has to do things slower, then simply do things slower. There's no excuse for hard freezes.

> You're trying to drive a Ferrari on a dirt road and claiming the dirt road is ar fault when your Ferrari has issues.

So btrfs in this metaphor is the Ferrari? Yes, my Ferrari definitely 100% has issues XD

Anyway, this particular USB drive I was able to push to the limit with XFS. Sustained reads and writes. Way more than the manufacturer would have tested for. And no freezes. I rest my case.