Btrfs progs release 6.3

Btrfs progs release 6.3

[David Sterba]

Hi,

btrfs-progs version 6.3 have been released.

There are some fixes and tweaks, the experimental status of block-group-tree
has been removed, namely the conversion but please still use it with care.

Otherwise there's nothing interesting from users' POV, more documentation is
being moved from archived wiki, updated tests.

The CI on github has been extended to cover devel and pre-release branches,
further enhancements are planned to do e.g. quick build tests for pull requests
or use self-hosted runners for heavier tests that may need to run against a
recent kernel. (https://github.com/kdave/btrfs-progs/actions)

Release process now uses more of the github features, so besides the tag itself
there's also a release with changelog (https://github.com/kdave/btrfs-progs/releases).
This allows to add "artifacts" i.e. other files besides the sources.

There are now static binaries published along with the release. They're built
inside the CI workflow "Static binaries" (also available there for download).
The upload is still done from an intermediate host so if you don't trust github
CI or me copying the files as-is, please build and use your own.

Please let me know if you have suggestions for improvements or if you find
problems with the CI/release things. It's new to me and I'm sure the are
already best practices to follow.

Changelog:
   * mkfs: option -R deprecated, options unified in -O (-R still works)
   * mkfs: fix potential race with udev leading to EBUSY due to repeatedly
     opened file descriptors
   * block-group-tree is out of experimental mode
      * available as 'mkfs.btrfs -O block-group-tree'
      * btrfstune can do in-place conversion to/from (use with care)
   * balance: fix recognizing old and new syntax
   * subvol snapshot: specific error if a failure is caused by an active swapfile
   * tree-stats: rephrase warning when run on a mounted filesystem
   * completion: 'filesystem du' also completes files
   * check: fix docs, help text and warning that --force + --repair works on a
     mounted filesystem
   * build: fix static build when static libudev is available
   * documentation:
      * more updates from wiki, developer docs, changelogs
      * reformatting
      * updates and fixes
   * other:
      * test updates and fixes
      * CI cleanups and old files removed
      * integration with Github actions

Tarballs: https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/kdave/btrfs-progs/
Git: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/kdave/btrfs-progs.git

Re: Btrfs progs release 6.3

[Neal Gompa]

On Thu, Apr 27, 2023 at 9:26 AM David Sterba <dsterba@suse.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> btrfs-progs version 6.3 have been released.
>
> There are some fixes and tweaks, the experimental status of block-group-tree
> has been removed, namely the conversion but please still use it with care.
>
> Otherwise there's nothing interesting from users' POV, more documentation is
> being moved from archived wiki, updated tests.
>
> The CI on github has been extended to cover devel and pre-release branches,
> further enhancements are planned to do e.g. quick build tests for pull requests
> or use self-hosted runners for heavier tests that may need to run against a
> recent kernel. (https://github.com/kdave/btrfs-progs/actions)
>
> Release process now uses more of the github features, so besides the tag itself
> there's also a release with changelog (https://github.com/kdave/btrfs-progs/releases).
> This allows to add "artifacts" i.e. other files besides the sources.
>
> There are now static binaries published along with the release. They're built
> inside the CI workflow "Static binaries" (also available there for download).
> The upload is still done from an intermediate host so if you don't trust github
> CI or me copying the files as-is, please build and use your own.
>
> Please let me know if you have suggestions for improvements or if you find
> problems with the CI/release things. It's new to me and I'm sure the are
> already best practices to follow.
>
> Changelog:
>    * mkfs: option -R deprecated, options unified in -O (-R still works)
>    * mkfs: fix potential race with udev leading to EBUSY due to repeatedly
>      opened file descriptors
>    * block-group-tree is out of experimental mode
>       * available as 'mkfs.btrfs -O block-group-tree'
>       * btrfstune can do in-place conversion to/from (use with care)
>    * balance: fix recognizing old and new syntax
>    * subvol snapshot: specific error if a failure is caused by an active swapfile
>    * tree-stats: rephrase warning when run on a mounted filesystem
>    * completion: 'filesystem du' also completes files
>    * check: fix docs, help text and warning that --force + --repair works on a
>      mounted filesystem
>    * build: fix static build when static libudev is available
>    * documentation:
>       * more updates from wiki, developer docs, changelogs
>       * reformatting
>       * updates and fixes
>    * other:
>       * test updates and fixes
>       * CI cleanups and old files removed
>       * integration with Github actions
>
> Tarballs: https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/kdave/btrfs-progs/
> Git: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/kdave/btrfs-progs.git

It seems like my patch to default to 4k pages[1] was missed for this
release, despite having three reviewed-by tags.

Can we get this pulled in for the next release then? And I guess the
patch will need to be updated to say 6.4 instead of 6.3...

[1]: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-btrfs/20230322221714.2702819-2-neal@gompa.dev/



--
真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!

Re: Btrfs progs release 6.3

[David Sterba]

On Thu, Apr 27, 2023 at 03:44:10PM -0400, Neal Gompa wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 27, 2023 at 9:26 AM David Sterba <dsterba@suse.com> wrote:
> > Tarballs: https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/kdave/btrfs-progs/
> > Git: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/kdave/btrfs-progs.git
> 
> It seems like my patch to default to 4k pages[1] was missed for this
> release, despite having three reviewed-by tags.

I'm aware of the patch, changes like that need more than just three
reviews. Switching to sectorsize different than page size affects
kernels/arches that are configured like that, which is now namely arm64
but power8/9 is still around and I've checked only a few main distros.

The testing coverage of the subpage code is very low on arm64 due to
slow hardware some of us have and upstream support of the boards is
lagging behind. First we need enough testing coverage for functionality
and then at least some basic performance results. Anand sent some
benchmarks which is good, but still not sufficient.

The situation with hardware may change soon so this is a start of the
evaluation.

> Can we get this pulled in for the next release then? And I guess the
> patch will need to be updated to say 6.4 instead of 6.3...

Changing defaults can take time and I can't promise any specific version
for that. We had a change in 5.15, it's better to pack more changes in
defaults to limit number of configuration so if there's next round the
4K will be among considered options. Until then we need to raise the
confidence that this will not cause problems.

There's a tracking issue for that with the points above
https://github.com/kdave/btrfs-progs/issues/604 .

What we can do now is to add a warning or reminder that on a host with
64K pages the portability may be limited and that this should be
reconsidered, with examples where this applies etc.

And once the change to 4k is done, backward compatibility would be
possibly kept by adding 'page' as a special keyword for sectorsize.