On Thursday 13 May 2010 01:38:59 David Austin wrote:
> My two cents' worth as a N900 owner:  I feel that the advantages of btrfs
> far outweigh the costs even on a platform like the N900.  Losing 30%
> of storage space is not pretty but the /opt "solution" is an ugly hack
> that has wasted considerable dev time and could be neatly sidestepped
> by btrfs.

Except that it actually doesn't help with this particular issue.  The 
N900 /opt problem is not because of using ext3 instead of btrfs, it is 
because Nokia needed to put the root filesystem on the (small, fast) NAND 
flash (for performance reasons).  As btrfs can't (for at least the next year 
or so) be used on NAND flash, it is completely irrelevant to the /opt 
problem.

By the way, I don't think anyone ever claimed it *would* solve the N900 /opt 
problem -- just that it would help avoid such problems in future devices (but 
only if devices are built such that btrfs can run on all the filesystem 
partitions).

> Also, if btrfs is the preferred filesystem for MeeGo then future devices
> will have better configurations to support it.  It's pretty clear that the
> N900 is going to be the minimum (or worst) hardware that MeeGo will
> run on.  We have to expect that the N900 will suffer a little because
> of that.

If the specualtion in this thread so far is accurate then the N900 is likely 
to suffer a *lot* in order to run MeeGo.  In particular, the proposal seems 
to be to put the whole filesystem on the plug-in memory card.  This has many 
advantages (including simplicity, and the ability to multiboot back to Maemo 
5, and no /opt problem whether ext3 or btrfs is used) but it will have a 
couple of major disadvantages: (i) speed, and (ii) losing the ability to use 
removable memory cards.

I agree with that decision but we need to realise that that is fine as a test 
system for developers, but is not a supportable end user configuration.

Graham
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