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Home » Featured, Filesystems

Quick BTRFS Test on OpenSuse 12.2

Submitted by on December 13, 2012 – 11:08 am 6 Comments

The recent announcement from Suse Enterprise Linux that Btrfs was production-ready raised some suspicions. The last time I tested btrfs (not very long ago) the primary issues were excessive CPU utilization and filesystem space that seemed to disappear into nowhere. So, as a quick test, I put together an OpenSuse 12.2 (3.4.6-2.10-desktop, OpenSuse 12.2) 64-bit VM (ESX) with 4 vCPUs, 4GB RAM, the OS disk and a 6GB striped LVM filesystem consisting of 4 4-GB virtual disks.

The results were consistent with my previous test of btrfs on physical hardware: high CPU utilization and excessive filesystem space utilization.

The filesystem is 6GB, but didn’t have enough space for a 4GB file:

os122:~ # bonnie++ -n 0 -u 0 -f -r 0 -s 4096 -b -d /striped

Using uid:0, gid:0.

Writing intelligently...done

Rewriting...Can't write block.: No space left on device

Bonnie: drastic I/O error (re write(2)): No space left on device

The rest of the space, I assume, was eaten up by btrfs metajunk. During the test, the 4 vCPUs went to 100% and system load reached 4.
top - 17:49:41 up 10 min,  2 users,  load average: 1.71, 0.99, 0.43

Tasks: 123 total,   7 running, 110 sleeping,   6 stopped,   0 zombie

%Cpu(s):  0.7 us, 96.3 sy,  0.0 ni,  0.0 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  3.0 si,  0.0 st

KiB Mem:   4057688 total,  3899232 used,   158456 free,       24 buffers

KiB Swap:   562172 total,        0 used,   562172 free,  3619024 cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S  %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND

1518 root      20   0     0    0    0 R  19.3  0.0   0:05.63 btrfs-endio-wri

1512 root      20   0     0    0    0 R  12.3  0.0   0:07.15 btrfs-submit-1

2157 root      20   0 23088 1452 1220 R  12.3  0.0   0:02.04 bonnie++

2100 root      20   0     0    0    0 R  11.0  0.0   0:05.76 btrfs-worker-2

1510 root      20   0     0    0    0 R  10.3  0.0   0:05.80 btrfs-worker-1

2101 root      20   0     0    0    0 R  10.3  0.0   0:05.73 btrfs-worker-3

2099 root      20   0     0    0    0 S   9.0  0.0   0:05.40 flush-btrfs-2

2102 root      20   0     0    0    0 S   5.3  0.0   0:06.21 btrfs-endio-wri

It would appear Suse got tired of fiddling with btrfs and decided to include it in their production release to get some free troubleshooting from the user community. And this would have been just fine if Suse didn’t claim btrfs was production-ready. Not even close.

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6 Comments »

  • Harry says:

    I am very new to opensuse. I don’t even know where to go to scan for the wireless routers in ther area. Can someone please help me connect to my wireless router at home.

  • johnkaiser 22 says:

    I’m either thinking of installin OPENSuse or Ubuntu, I want to know which version of these two saves the most power. Ubuntu, GNOME OPENSuse, or KDE OPENSuse? Which one saves the most power in the laptop. Btw, What are the differences between the three?
    I just found out about Zorin OS. What’s the best for power?
    What I mean is, is Zorin better than Ubuntu, or OPENSuse for power efficiency in a laptop? Which is the best for power efficiency in a laptop?

  • Caltel T says:

    I want to dual boot OpenSUSE with XP.

    XP is already installed, and I only have one partition. Obviously with XP already installed I can’t create another partition. Or not that I know off!

    Any ideas?

  • thexbox360player says:

    I have installed opensuse for the fist time and I have no idea what linux-sb1g login is meant to be. Its un 2Welcmnee to openSUSE 12.1 @Asparagus@ – Kernel 3.10-.1.2-desktop (rryl1)

  • Disrae says:

    Hello to all Linux users, I’m kinda new to openSuse, I’m used to Debian derivatives and apt package manager, so I wanted to ask:
    After removing repository using “zypper rr” command, and running “zypper update”, what happens to the packages which where installed from that particular repository?

    I’m trying to remove all packages from packman-multimedia repo, I’m not sure if just removing repo is enough!

    Thanks, bye!

  • The Dark Knight says:

    Is it correct that the 3 types of linux are Fedora (Red Hat), openSUSE (Novell), Ubuntu (Canonical Ltd.)? And what do most people refer to these as? aka Red Hat or Fedora?

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