Im giving a go fedora silverblue on a new laptop but Im unable to boot (and since im a linux noob the first thing i tried was installing it fresh again but that didnt resolve it).
its a single drive partitioned to ext4 and encrypted with luks (its basically the default config from the fedora installation)
any ideas for things to try?
@possiblylinux127 @evasync I can’t speak for them, but I’ve had btrfs blow up in ways I could not fix. I didn’t just lose a file but the entire file system. I have NEVER had this happen in many years with ext4.
Was that in the last 5 years? If it was btrfs is now far more stable. It has never blown up for me and it has in fact saved my data a few times.
@possiblylinux127 It was this year. Glad it’s working for you. I’ll stick with what works for me and has provided adequate performance for years.
I’ve only had this happen once and it turned out it was because my ram was shitting out errors that were saved to disk so it ended up not being btrfs’s fault
ext4 is just terrible for the inode issue, because you’ll be forced to reformat and reinstall again. Anyone using NixOS or Guix with multiple store write operation should not go near it.
NixOS and ext4 user here with no problems. Care to elaborate?
Yet. Just like most of the articles out there, this problem will start showing up around 5 months to a year, depending on how much storage you have and how much
nixos-rebuild switch/guix system reconfigureyou use - I had around 512GB, so I ran out of inodes quickly, and despite have lots of storage space, the system was unusable for me.Here’s the exact issue that even others have talked about:
NixOS #1
NixOS #2
Guix #1
Guix #2
TL:DR; is, your NixOS and Guix system will break due to high inode usage, preventing you to access shell even after clearing older generations. In most cases, you can not even clear older generations, simply because you ran out of inodes. More about filesystem has been discussed here.
Seems like this can be prevented from reaching that point by properly deleting old generations regularly though right?
No, those inodes still won’t clear on their own - sure, you’ll be able to prolong for a few weeks or months, but then you’ll reach a point where you’ll end up with just a single generation, and you can do nothing to clear space. The device will mislead you with free space, but they are not accessible, neither can you try to force freeing space by running disk operations manually where the stores are present - because a) that’s a bad idea and b) you’ll not have the permission to. That’s what happened to me, and I had to reinstall the entire system again.
Besides, deleting generations regularly would defeat the point of having a rollback system. Sure, for normal desktop usage, you could live with preserving the last twenty to thirty generations, but this may be detrimental for servers that requires the ability to rollback to every generation possible, or low-end platform constrained with space, and therefore, limited generations.
Lol same thing happened to me about 6 months ago. Overheating and/or a failing M2 and system corruption. btrfs got weird and troubleshooting only made it worse.