[CentOS] LVM hatred, was Re: /boot on a separate partition?

[Chris Murphy]

Chris Adams linux at cmadams.net Wed Jun 24 19:06:19 UTC 2015
>Btrfs may eventually obsolete a lot of
> uses of LVM, but that's down the road.

LVM is the emacs of storage. It'll be here forever.

Btrfs doesn't export (virtual) block devices like LVM can, so it can't
be a backing for say iSCSI. And it's also at the moment rather
catatonic when it comes to VM images. This is mitigated if you set
xattr +C at image create time (it must be zero length file for +C to
take). But if you cp --reflink or snapshot the containing subvolume,
then COW starts to happen for new writes to either copy; overwrites to
either copies newly written blocks are nocow. So anyway you can
quickly get into complicated states with VM images on Btrfs. I'm not
sure of the long term plan.

This is how to set xattr +C at qcow2 create time, only applicable when
the qcow2 is on Btrfs.

# qemu-img create -o nocow=on

But really piles more testing is needed to better understand some
things with Btrfs and VMs. It's all quite complicated what's going on
with these layers. Even though my VM images get monstrous numbers of
fragments if I don't use +C, I haven't yet seen a big performance
penalty as a result when the host and guest are using Btrfs and the
cache is set to unsafe. Now, you might say, that's crazy! It's called
unsafe for a reason! Yes, but I've also viscously killed the VM while
writes were happening and at most I lose a bit of data that was in
flight, the guest fs is not corrupt at all, not even any complaints on
the remount. I've got limited testing killing the host while the
writes are happening, and there is more data loss due to delayed
allocation probably, but again the host and guest Btrfs are fine - no
mount complaints at all. And you kinda hope the host isn't often
dying...

NTFS in qcow2 on Btrfs without +C however? From Btrfs list anecdote
this combination appears to cause hundreds of thousands of fragments
in short order, and serious performance penalties. But I haven't
tested this. I'm guessing something about NTFS journalling and
flushing, and suboptimal cache setting for libvirt is probably causing
too aggressive flushes to disk and each flush is a separate extent.
Just a guess.

-- 
Chris Murphy