I do not know a distro that has it not as module. There have been people on this forum building own kernel and made it not a module. That was Buster or Bullseye times. I have always kept it default, simply using initramfs. Was anyhow the default for Ubuntu and Opensuse, both had working initramfs handling for RPi, RPiOS before Bookworm is broken w.r.t. apt upgrade.Is btrfs still built as a module rather than a kernel built-in? Last box I setup with a btrfs root was running Bullseye so quite a bit of work to get a suitable initramfs put together though that should be easier on Bookworm as it uses an initramfs by default.
In the early days (around 2013 or so), at boot, a userspace 'btrfs scan' was needed AFAIR to register multi-device filesystems. That did take quite a while for large arrays, so that was done from initramfs or later anyhow. Maybe that made developers decide to build it as module. Advantage is, you can unload it, do fixes/changes to the source-code, rebuild, load and mount a non-rootfs again without reboot the whole machine, I have done that in the past.
But I do not know exactly what the BTRFS code does at initialization nowadays. Maybe it only registers filesystems that are on a blockdevice that the kernel has made a dev-node for already, so /dev/sda2 /dev/mmcblk0p2 etc. Like LVM, more is needed for /dev/mapper/... or iSCSI and so on. If I want to know, I would rebuild the kernel, only toggle that 'as module' yes/no.
This: https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfsAny chance of a link? Last time I looked I couldn't find anything. But that might be just my search skills failing.
Last time I used it was in 2017 I think, I have an old local copy of the driver on my NAS I see. But computers/laptops that came with Windows license I have made dual/multi-boot. So I simply use Linux almost all the time.
Statistics: Posted by redvli — Mon Oct 14, 2024 8:02 am