Having a few days of time off from work I’ve committed to migrating my archlinux based laptops to using btrfs. I’ve to date been just using ext4 and nilfs2 (on an SD card) on my eeepc and plain old ext4 on the bigger laptop.
The main motivation was that the two devices were pretty outdated and I felt lucky with doing a major upgrade (replaced sysvinit with systemd as recommended by the archlinux people)
I didn’t want to reinstall my machines so I took the route of converting the existing ext4 partitions to btrfs. I left my /boot partition as ext2 for safety. Prior to converting to btrfs I had upgraded the two laptops to using grub2 first. I then proceeded to boot up my laptops with the archlinux installer image via a usb key. Then just followed the btrfs documentation at the archlinux wiki.
The process went more smoothly than I had anticipated, I didn’t run into any major stumbling blocks, that said I did have to free up some space for the migration to occur.
Once the systems were back up and running I enabled compression on btrfs and defragged the systems
find / -xdev -type f -print -exec btrfs filesystem defrag '{}' \;
This compression feature made a huge difference on the space limited eeepc, the compression feature reclaimed about 10% of the space on the system. It’s a shame that the RHEL based distros aren’t quite supporting btrfs yet there are quite a few nice features there that are very attractive for pro-consumers and the enterprise. RHEL7 will have btrfs, hopefully there will be backports to RHEL6.
Performance wise I haven’t used the system in anger yet, so time will tell if I’m happy with btrfs or not.