There is some stuff that I hate, but I tend to come back to it for my home server just because of livepatch, which is nice to minimize the amount of reboots necessary and having a patched kernel for all my LXCs makes then also automatically protected.
Filesystems aren’t so simple. Modern advanced filesystems like btrfs, zfs and bcachefs are more than just filesystems.
E.g. they include features like volume management, compression and sometimes encryption. Most features can also be achieved with for example ext4 + lvm + luks, but it’s nice to have all in one system with unified configuration.
tl;dr
Btrfs does more than ext4, which can have a negative performance impact, depending on the use case/metric. Usually the features gained by btrfs outweigh the small difference in performance imo.
Btrfs doesn’t do encryption, so luks is still necessary. LVM isn’t needed since btrfs subvolumes achieve the same in a more flexible way (no fixed size, snapshots).
It’s mostly better, but not in every way. It has a lot of useful features, at a performance cost sometimes. A cost that historically wasn’t a problem with spinning hard drives and relatively slow SATA SSDs but will show up more on really fast NVMes.
The snapshots, it has to keep track of what’s been modified. Depending on the block size, an update of just a couple bytes can end up as a few 4k write because it’s Copy-on-Write and it has to update a journal and it has to update the block list of the file. But at the same time, copying a 50GB file is instantaneous on btrfs because of the same CoW feature. Most people find the snapshots more useful than eeking out every last bit of performance out of your drive.
Even ZFS, often considered to be the gold standard of filesystems, is actually kinda slow. But its purpose isn’t to be the fastest, its purpose is throwing an array of 200 drives at it and trusting it to protect you even against some media degradation and random bit flips in your storage with regular scrubs.
A couple nits to pick: BTRFS doesn’t use/need journaling because of its CoW nature - data on the disk is always correct because it doesn’t write data back over the same block it came from. Only once data is written successfully will the pointer be moved to the newly-written block. Also, instantaneous copies from BTRFS are actually due to reflinking instead of CoW (XFS can also do reflinking despite not being CoW, and ZFS didn’t have this feature until OpenZFS 2.2 which just released).
I agree with the ZFS bit and I’m firmly in the BTRFS/ZFS > Ext4/XFS/etc camp unless you have a specific performance usecase. The ability to scrub checksums of data is so invaluable in my opinion, not to mention all the other killer features. People have been running Ext4 systems for decades pretending that if Ext4 does not see the bitrot, the bitrot does not exist. (then BTRFS picks up a bad checksum and people scold it for being a bad filesystem)
People have been running Ext4 systems for decades pretending that if Ext4 does not see the bitrot, the bitrot does not exist. (then BTRFS picks up a bad checksum and people scold it for being a bad filesystem)
ZFS made me discover that my onboard SATA controller sucks and returns bad data occasionally under heavy load. My computer cannot complete a ZFS scrub without finding errors, every single time.
Ext4, bcache and mdadm never complained about it, ever. There was never any sign that something was wrong at all.
100% worth it if you care about your data. I can definitely feel the hit on my NVMe but it’s also doing so much more.
A file system and a raid setup all in one with facebook's code for de-/compression ... yet another piece of software that tries to do the work for several others.
ext4 will rarely have extreme loads unless all you do is backup and mirroring. For more accurate data read/write and better checks use xfs and external journaling. On M2 it is by far the fastest solution and far more secure than ext.
On magnetic disk there is physical location for each bit of data written, for ssd it is all virtual space handled by internal software simulating a magnetic drive. The variation from disk to disk is much higher than the sensitivity of the fs.
You want accuracy and reliability of data storage, use HDD and Raid!
RAID doesn’t checksum and heal the rotten data. It’s game over before you even have a filesystem on top of it, because said filesystem can’t directly access the underlying disks because of the RAID layer.
Errors will occur, and RAID has no way of handling it. You have a RAID1, disk 1 says it’s a 0, disk 2 says it’s a 1. Who’s right? RAID can’t tell, btrfs and ZFS can. RAID won’t even notice there’s a couple flipped bits, it’ll just pass them along. ZFS will just retry the read on both disks, pick the block that matches the checksum, and write the correct data back on the other disk. That’s why people with lots of data loves ZFS and RAIDZ.
The solution isn’t more reliable hardware, the solution software that can tell you and recover from your failing hardware.
Although I think having to fix a borked bootloader is a good bit of experience, it's probably not something you are always going to want to spend time on. I have used boot-repair only once, but it was like magic. Just throwing it out there for your future use and a general recommendation. :)
Did a search for ubuntu “integrity: problem loading x.509 certificate” and the first result indicates out of date bios certificates needed for secure boot on older laptops. Disabling secure boot seems to be the suggested fix.
You might check your BIOS clock time too, if the certs are ‘expired’, it might be the future, or more likely, the past. Certs have validity timers that specify start and end.
It’s more likely that your BIOS is just old, and you’ll have to keep secure boot disabled from now on.
Who cares? I am fine with the way it is, I am just going to be annoyed with the UI being updated anyways. I am still annoyed by the thunderbird update cause now dark reader takes a second to give me dark mode emails.
Dark reader works? I am using dark background light text and that doesnt work, also some addons are not yet in the Thunderbird store. I can recommend ublock origin with custom *.zip *.mov filters, essential
Thunderbird got better, even though advanced filters are now gone? Not sure when.
But modern Toolkits are important especially for Wayland support
Ok I admit I never thought about using ublock on thunderbird but it sounds interesting, could you explain what advantages it and those filters give? As far as I know TB already blocks some elements within emails for security and privacy purposes
Yes Adblocking is often not needed and may slow down your TB. But people putting filenames with *.mov and *.zip in them would mean you click them and actually open URLs, as these are now registered TLDs. A very stupid idea of Google
Nix packages arent containerized by default. But since every depenedency is clearly defined. there are tools wrap packkages using bublewrap, or tools build layered docker imahes
Great thanks! So Fedora+Nix (maybe some hacky way to symlink it to /var/nix on every boot and it can run on Atomic too)+bubblejail (there is a COPR now for use in secureblue) could be a great setup!
Any info about namespaces? Hardened kernels block these for valid reasons. Flatpaks can use bubblewrap-suid, Podman is supposedly not compatible (not sure about that)
I use a tiling WM for everything. Libreoffice, games, Firefox/Chromium, file managers, etc. It all works and it is a great way to handle multiple monitors.
well, I’m not sure traditional is the right word, multiseat has been used for a very long time. It used to be a bit better supported. The issue is that since the migration to wayland, it has become… a lot less supported. It is still possible, but most of the guides are x11 guides for a reason.
EDIT: I should say I hope seatd at some point could support multiseat but at the current time I don’t think it has any facilities to, systemd-logind / elogind do support multiseat, but I dont currently use them
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