Re: SLES 11 SP4: can't mount btrfs

[Andrei Borzenkov <arvidjaar@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Oct 24, 2017 at 2:53 PM, Austin S. Hemmelgarn
<ahferroin7@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> SLES (and OpenSUSE in general) does do something special though, they use
> subvolumes and qgroups to replicate multiple independent partitions (which
> is a serious pain in the arse), and they have snapshotting with snapper by
> default as well.  On OpenSUSE at least you can dispense with all that crap
> by telling the installer to not enable snapshot support, not sure about SLES
> though.

SUSE is using so many subvolumes because
a) it wants to use snapshot of operating system to enable rollback
b) data that needs to be part of snapshot includes RPM database
c) RPM database is located on /var

So they were forced to make /var part of root subvolume and explicitly
exclude everything below /var by making it separate subvolumes.

Fortunately it is going to change now with both RH and SUSE moving RPM
database under /usr. Which leaves you basically with / and /var as
default subvolumes.