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Good Btrfs Feature Interactions

bees has been tested in combination with the following:

  • btrfs compression (zlib, lzo, zstd), mixtures of compressed and uncompressed extents
  • PREALLOC extents (unconditionally replaced with holes)
  • HOLE extents and btrfs no-holes feature
  • Other deduplicators, reflink copies (though bees may decide to redo their work)
  • btrfs snapshots and non-snapshot subvols (RW and RO)
  • Concurrent file modification (e.g. PostgreSQL and sqlite databases, VMs, build daemons)
  • All btrfs RAID profiles
  • IO errors during dedupe (read errors will throw exceptions, bees will catch them and skip over the affected extent)
  • Filesystems mounted with or without the flushoncommit option
  • 4K filesystem data block size / clone alignment
  • 64-bit and 32-bit LE host CPUs (amd64, x86, arm)
  • Large files (kernel 5.4 or later strongly recommended)
  • Filesystems up to 90T+ bytes, 1000M+ files
  • btrfs receive
  • btrfs nodatacow/nodatasum inode attribute or mount option (bees skips all nodatasum files)
  • open(O_DIRECT) (seems to work as well--or as poorly--with bees as with any other btrfs feature)
  • lvm dm-cache, writecache

Bad Btrfs Feature Interactions

bees has been tested in combination with the following, and various problems are known:

  • btrfs send: there are bugs in btrfs send that can be triggered by bees on old kernels. The --workaround-btrfs-send option works around this issue by preventing bees from modifying read-only snapshots.

  • btrfs qgroups: very slow, sometimes hangs...and it's even worse when bees is running.

  • btrfs autodefrag mount option: bees cannot distinguish autodefrag activity from normal filesystem activity, and may try to undo the autodefrag if duplicate copies of the defragmented data exist.

Untested Btrfs Feature Interactions

bees has not been tested with the following, and undesirable interactions may occur:

  • Non-4K filesystem data block size (should work if recompiled)
  • Non-equal hash (SUM) and filesystem data block (CLONE) sizes (need to fix that eventually)
  • btrfs seed filesystems (no particular reason it wouldn't work, but no one has reported trying)
  • btrfs out-of-tree kernel patches (e.g. in-kernel dedupe, encryption, extent tree v2)
  • btrfs-convert from ext2/3/4 (never tested, might run out of space or ignore significant portions of the filesystem due to sanity checks)
  • btrfs mixed block groups (don't know a reason why it would not work, but never tested)
  • Host CPUs with exotic page sizes, alignment requirements, or endianness (ppc, alpha, sparc, strongarm, s390, mips, m68k...)
  • bcache: used to be in the "bad" list, now in the "untested" list because nobody is rigorously testing, and bcache bugs come and go
  • flashcache: an out-of-tree cache-HDD-on-SSD block layer helper