Hi Stefan,
Sorry for the delay but other things got in the way.
On 29/04/2026 20:53, Stefan Schantl wrote:
Hello Adolf,
thanks for joining the conversation.
Hi Stefan,
On 29/04/2026 19:25, Stefan Schantl wrote:
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.
IPFire has to be installed from fresh to get the btrfs filesystem but
can you confirm that then you can do a restore from an IPFire backup
from an ext4 filesystem to get all settings, without any issues due
to the filesystem.
My understanding is that bis the case but I would just like to have
it confirmed.
Yes indeed, it should be possible to restore a backup which has been
taken on a different filesystem. I did not tested this yet, but there
shouldn't be any issues to be expected.
So the install worked fine and once I found the location of the snapshot
section, I was able to take a snapshot of the system as I had installed it.
I then did a restore from one of my backups. That did not go 100% smoothly.
After doing the restore and then doing a reboot, unbound failed to start with
the message user unbound can not be found.
I did a fresh install and then checked the /etc/passwd file and it had a user
unbound in it.
I checked two of my CU201 systems and neither of them have user unbound.
unbound in my CU201 systems is running with user nobody.
I confirmed that in the btrfs testing release unbound is running with user
unbound.
I could not find anything to explain why the user had been changed but if it is
required then the restore process will need to add that user otherwise it will
be missing after doing a restore, as was the case with my restore attempt.
Regards,
Adolf.
Thanks for the hint, we defenitely should drop a few lines about this
in the wiki and/or release notes when we are in a release stage.
Best regards,
-Stefan
Regards,
Adolf.
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
