DESCRIPTION

This document describes topics related to BTRFS that are not specific to the tools. Currently covers:

1. mount options

2. file attributes

MOUNT OPTIONS

This section describes mount options specific to BTRFS. For the generic mount options please refer to mount(8) manpage. The options are sorted alphabetically (discarding the no prefix).

acl, noacl

(default: on)

Enable/disable support for Posix Access Control Lists (ACLs). See the acl(5) manual page for more information about ACLs.

alloc_start=bytes

(default: 1M, minimum: 1M)

Debugging option to force all block allocations above a certain byte threshold on each block device. The value is specified in bytes, optionally with a K, M, or G suffix (case insensitive).

This option was used for testing and has no practical use, it's slated to be removed in the future.

autodefrag, noautodefrag

(since: 3.0, default: off)

Enable automatic file defragmentation. When enabled, small random writes into files (in a range of tens of kilobytes, currently it's 64K) are detected and queued up for the defragmentation process. Not well suited for large database workloads.

The read latency may increase due to reading the adjacent blocks that make up the range for defragmentation, successive write will merge the blocks in the new location.

Warning
Defragmenting with Linux kernel versions < 3.9 or ≥ 3.14-rc2 as well as with Linux stable kernel versions ≥ 3.10.31, ≥ 3.12.12 or ≥ 3.13.4 will break up the ref-links of CoW data (for example files copied with cp --reflink, snapshots or de-duplicated data). This may cause considerable increase of space usage depending on the broken up ref-links.

barrier, nobarrier

(default: on)

Ensure that all IO write operations make it through the device cache and are stored permanently when the filesystem is at it's consistency checkpoint. This typically means that a flush command is sent to the device that will synchronize all pending data and ordinary metadata blocks, then writes the superblock and issues another flush.

The write flushes incur a slight hit and also prevent the IO block scheduler to reorder requests in more effective way. Disabling barriers gets rid of that penalty but will most certainly lead to a corrupted filesystem in case of a crash or power loss. The ordinary metadata blocks could be yet unwritten at the time the new superblock is stored permanently, expecting that the block pointers to metadata were stored permanently before.

On a device with a volatile battery-backed write-back cache, the nobarrier option will not lead to filesystem corruption as the pending blocks are supposed to make it to the permanent storage.

check_int, check_int_data, check_int_print_mask=value

(since: 3.0, default: off)

These debugging options control the behavior of the integrity checking module (the BTRFS_FS_CHECK_INTEGRITY config option required).

check_int enables the integrity checker module, which examines all block write requests to ensure on-disk consistency, at a large memory and CPU cost.

check_int_data includes extent data in the integrity checks, and implies the check_int option.

check_int_print_mask takes a bitmask of BTRFSIC_PRINT_MASK_* values as defined in fs/btrfs/check-integrity.c, to control the integrity checker module behavior.

See comments at the top of fs/btrfs/check-integrity.c for more info.

clear_cache

Force clearing and rebuilding of the disk space cache if something has gone wrong. See also: space_cache.

commit=seconds

(since: 3.12, default: 30)

Set the interval of periodic commit. Higher values defer data being synced to permanent storage with obvious consequences when the system crashes. The upper bound is not forced, but a warning is printed if it's more than 300 seconds (5 minutes).

compress, compress=type, compress-force, compress-force=type

(default: off)

Control BTRFS file data compression. Type may be specified as zlib, lzo or no (for no compression, used for remounting). If no type is specified, zlib is used. If compress-force is specified, all files will be compressed, whether or not they compress well.

Note
If compression is enabled, nodatacow and nodatasum are disabled.

datacow, nodatacow

(default: on)

Enable data copy-on-write for newly created files. Nodatacow implies nodatasum, and disables compression. All files created under nodatacow are also set the NOCOW file attribute (see chattr(1)).

datasum, nodatasum

(default: on)

Enable data checksumming for newly created files. Datasum implies datacow, ie. the normal mode of operation. All files created under nodatasum inherit the "no checksums" property, however there's no corresponding file attribute (see chattr(1)).

degraded

(default: off)

Allow mounts with less devices than the raid profile constraints require. A read-write mount (or remount) may fail with too many devices missing, for example if a stripe member is completely missing from RAID0.

device=devicepath

Specify a path to a device that will be scanned for BTRFS filesystem during mount. This is usually done automatically by a device manager (like udev) or using the btrfs device scan command (eg. run from the initial ramdisk). In cases where this is not possible the device mount option can help.

Note
booting eg. a RAID1 system may fail even if all filesystem's device paths are provided as the actual device nodes may not be discovered by the system at that point.

discard, nodiscard

(default: off)

Enable discarding of freed file blocks using TRIM operation. This is useful for SSD devices, thinly provisioned LUNs or virtual machine images where the backing device understands the operation. Depending on support of the underlying device, the operation may severely hurt performance in case the TRIM operation is synchronous (eg. with SATA devices up to revision 3.0).

If discarding is not necessary to be done at the block freeing time, there's fstrim tool that lets the filesystem discard all free blocks in a batch, possibly not much interfering with other operations.

enospc_debug, noenospc_debug

(default: off)

Enable verbose output for some ENOSPC conditions. It's safe to use but can be noisy if the system hits reaches near-full state.

fatal_errors=action

(since: 3.4, default: bug)

Action to take when encountering a fatal error.

bug

BUG() on a fatal error, the system will stay in the crashed state and may be still partially usable, but reboot is required for full operation

panic

panic() on a fatal error, depending on other system configuration, this may be followed by a reboot. Please refer to the documentation of kernel boot parameters, eg. panic, oops or crashkernel.

flushoncommit, noflushoncommit

(default: on)

This option forces any data dirtied by a write in a prior transaction to commit as part of the current commit. This makes the committed state a fully consistent view of the file system from the application's perspective (i.e., it includes all completed file system operations). This was previously the behavior only when a snapshot was created.

Disabling flushing may improve performance but is not crash-safe.

fragment=type

(depends on compile-time option BTRFS_DEBUG, since: 4.4, default: off)

A debugging helper to intentionally fragment given type of block groups. The type can be data, metadata or all. This mount option should not be used outside of debugging environments and is not recognized if the kernel config option BTRFS_DEBUG is not enabled.

inode_cache, noinode_cache

(since: 3.0, default: off)

Enable free inode number caching. Not recommended to use unless files on your filesystem get assigned inode numbers that are approaching 264. Normally, new files in each subvolume get assigned incrementally (plus one from the last time) and are not reused. The mount option turns on caching of the existing inode numbers and reuse of inode numbers of deleted files.

This option may slow down your system at first run, or after mounting without the option.

Note
Defaults to off due to a potential overflow problem when the free space checksums don't fit inside a single page.

max_inline=bytes

(default: min(8192, page size) )

Specify the maximum amount of space, in bytes, that can be inlined in a metadata B-tree leaf. The value is specified in bytes, optionally with a K suffix (case insensitive). In practice, this value is limited by the filesystem block size (named sectorsize at mkfs time), and memory page size of the system. In case of sectorsize limit, there's some space unavailable due to leaf headers. For example, a 4k sectorsize, max inline data is ~3900 bytes.

Inlining can be completely turned off specifying 0. This will increase data block slack if file sizes are much smaller than block size but will reduce metadata consumption in return.

metadata_ratio=value

(default: 0, internal logic)

Specifies that 1 metadata chunk should be allocated after every value data chunks. Default behaviour depends on internal logic, some percent of unused metadata space is attempted to be maintained but is not always possible if there's not space left for chunk allocation. The option could be useful to override the internal logic in favor of the metadata allocation if the expected workload is supposed to be metadata intense (snapshots, reflinks, xattrs, inlined files).

recovery

(since: 3.2, default: off)

Enable autorecovery attempts if a bad tree root is found at mount time. Currently this scans a backup list of several previous tree roots and tries to use the first readable. This can be used with read-only mounts as well.

rescan_uuid_tree

(since: 3.12, default: off)

Force check and rebuild procedure of the UUID tree. This should not normally be needed.

skip_balance

(since: 3.3, default: off)

Skip automatic resume of interrupted balance operation after mount. May be resumed with btrfs balance resume or the paused state can be removed by btrfs balance cancel.

space_cache, space_cache=v2, nospace_cache

(nospace_cache since: 3.2, space_cache=v2 since 4.5, default: on)

Options to control the free space cache. This affects performance as searching for new free blocks could take longer if the space cache is not enabled. On the other hand, managing the space cache consumes some resources. It can be disabled without clearing at mount time.

There are two implementations of how the space is tracked. The safe default is v1. On large filesystems (many-terabytes) and certain workloads the v1 performance may degrade. This problem is addressed by v2, that is based on b-trees, sometimes referred to as free-space-tree.

Compatibility notes:

• the v2 has to be enabled manually at mount time, once

• kernel without v2 support will be able to mount the filesystem in read-only mode

• v2 can be removed by mounting with clear_cache

ssd, nossd, ssd_spread

(default: SSD autodetected)

Options to control SSD allocation schemes. By default, BTRFS will enable or disable SSD allocation heuristics depending on whether a rotational or non-rotational disk is in use. The ssd and nossd options can override this autodetection.

The ssd_spread mount option attempts to allocate into bigger and aligned chunks of unused space, and may perform better on low-end SSDs. ssd_spread implies ssd, enabling all other SSD heuristics as well.

subvol=path

Mount subvolume from path rather than the toplevel subvolume. The path is absolute (ie. starts at the toplevel subvolume). This mount option overrides the default subvolume set for the given filesystem.

subvolid=subvolid

Mount subvolume specified by a subvolid number rather than the toplevel subvolume. You can use btrfs subvolume list to see subvolume ID numbers. This mount option overrides the default subvolume set for the given filesystem.

subvolrootid=objectid

(irrelevant since: 3.2, formally deprecated since: 3.10)

A workaround option from times (pre 3.2) when it was not possible to mount a subvolume that did not reside directly under the toplevel subvolume.

thread_pool=number

(default: min(NRCPUS + 2, 8) )

The number of worker threads to allocate. NRCPUS is number of on-line CPUs detected at the time of mount. Small number leads to less parallelism in processing data and metadata, higher numbers could lead to a performance due to increased locking contention, cache-line bouncing or costly data transfers between local CPU memories.

treelog, notreelog

(default: on)

Enable the tree logging used for fsync and O_SYNC writes. The tree log stores changes without the need of a full filesystem sync. The log operations are flushed at sync and transaction commit. If the system crashes between two such syncs, the pending tree log operations are replayed during mount.

Warning
currently, the tree log is replayed even with a read-only mount!

The tree log could contain new files/directories, these would not exist on a mounted filesystem if the log is not replayed.

user_subvol_rm_allowed

(default: off)

Allow subvolumes to be deleted by their respective owner. Otherwise, only the root user can do that.

FILE ATTRIBUTES

The btrfs filesystem supports setting the following file attributes using the chattr(1) utility:

a

append only, new writes are always written at the end of the file

A

no atime updates

c

compress data, all data written after this attribute is set will be compressed. Please note that compression is also affected by the mount options or the parent directory attributes.

When set on a directory, all newly created files will inherit this attribute.

C

no copy-on-write, file modifications are done in-place

When set on a directory, all newly created files will inherit this attribute.

Note
due to implementation limitations, this flag can be set/unset only on empty files.

d

no dump, makes sense with 3rd party tools like dump(8), on BTRFS the attribute can be set/unset on no other special handling is done

D

synchronous directory updates, for more details search open(2) for O_SYNC and O_DSYNC

i

immutable, no file data and metadata changes allowed even to the root user as long as this attribute is set (obviously the exception is unsetting the attribute)

S

synchronous updates, for more details search open(2) for O_SYNC and O_DSYNC

X

no compression, permanently turn off compression on the given file, other compression mount options will not affect that

When set on a directory, all newly created files will inherit this attribute.

No other attributes are supported. For the complete list please refer to the chattr(1) manual page.