Hello list followers, a lot of time has been passed since the initial support for BTRFS has been introduced in IPFire. Sadly the further development process has been slowed down significantly - mainly because of personal reasons and as a result of them, the lack of spare time on my side.
All the more I'm very happy to announce the next milestone on this list and share the current development state. The roadmap on our wiki page can be found here: https://www.ipfire.org/docs/roadmap/btrfs The code to take snapshots, manage them, boot into a certain snapshot or to restore them finally has been arrived. All these actions easily can be accessed from the CGI page for backups on the IPFire WUI. On this page a new section called "Snapshots" will be displayed in case BTRFS has been chosen during the install process of IPFire. The page layout and style is not final yet, but everything is expected to work properly. In case you have any ideas how to improve the look and feel of the CGI page please provide some feedback here. The grub boot menu automatically will be extended when the first snapshot has been created with an additional entry to access and boot into a select-able snapshot in case the system broke or for any other testing purposes. I've also extend the code of the pakfire package manager to create a snapshot before installing a core update. To summarize the above the snapshot feature would be a big step forward, because it a allows anybody to go back if some unexpected error occur after an update, a testing update breaks anything, for hunting when a certain bug has been seen for the first time, etc... To took the last remaining steps and get the feature into the distribution some more testing and feedback is required. Therefore I've backed and uploaded an ISO image for all who are interested and want to join testing. Sadly IPFire has to be re-installed with BTRFS because there is no way to migrate an existing installation to a different file system. The current (and may later) images can be found here: https://people.ipfire.org/~stevee/BTRFS/ According to testing and feedback there are some additional questions which appeared during development and needs some attention: * Should BTRFS become the default selected file system during installation? (At the moment this is ext4) * Should the pre-generated images use BTRFS? (At the moment they are also ext4) * Do we want an automatic snapshot for each single core update, or do we want a single one in case multiple core updates will be installed in one go? (Currently I've implemented a snapshot for each single update) * Maybe I missed something - feel free to ask any questions or share your opinions here. A big thanks in advance to anyone who wants to contribute and helps to finalize this amazing feature. Best regards, -Stefan
