SoylentNews

So I converted my /home to btrfs, because I'm quite tight on space and thought the compression would be a benefit.

I had to compile btrfs-progs myself, which also included compiling libext2fs from e2fsprogs. Once I started the conversion, it took 3 hours to convert.

It was successful. I rebooted, logged in, and all my data was intact. The transparent compression I had asked for in my fstab was working.
There was a noticable performance penalty, but that's to be expected with compression.

I use compressed btrfs on my portable SubLinux thumbdrive I keep on my keychain. I've had no problems there,
However, once I started copying data to and from the newly converted filesystem in any size, I noticed a padlock had appeared on everything in Thunar file manager. I suspected a problem, so I went to dmesg. There was a backtrace from btrfs. The kernel's driver had crashed, and it had remounted my new filesystem read-only.

I panicked, fearing the worst. I quickly went to a tty, killed Xorg, unmounted /home, and ran btrfs-convert -r on the partition to undo the conversion.

Thankfully, the un-conversion was successful. I remounted /home and restarted my login manager, logged in, and everything was normal again, running from ext4. No data loss I can see. I ran md5sum on files I suspected might be damaged, they match. No harm done it appears.

Lesson for today: While the filesystem's disk format is indeed stable, the drivers and utilities for managing the filesystem are NOT. Use btrfs at your own peril.

I still like ext4. It's so hard to kill an ext4 filesystem.