Feature request BtrFS install images.

Teathief

I hope this is the right place for this, not a support request just a feature idea.
It would make my year to see these from Pi system vendors, especially with how hard it is to torture a existing image into one.
Running through seeing the hit or miss support for different compression formats across the spectrum of emulators supported. The idea hit me that I wish I could just use the same filesystem I use on my desktop and enable full drive compression, using one of the mounting options BtrFS suports like.

[code]
compress=(lzo or zlib) or compress-force=(lzo or zlib)
[/code]

The side effect of nailing a ton of other parts (all) of the system that wouldn't normally see compression would make it a lot more effective then all the work to support different compression formats in the emulators themselves.
It seems to work well enough too playing around with another system that uses it.
I wasn't able to tell a speed difference and on many systems its a speed up but with higher CPU utilization during file transfers.

There are other benefits but the drive compression is the main one I'd like to use.

zerojay

BtrFS is a horrifically bad choice on an SD card. BtrFS with compression is unstable in general even on hard drives, BtrFS is extremely prone to fragmentation and shouldn't be used anywhere that you might have at higher than 90% disk space used. Defragging will heavily hit your number of writes to an SD card extremely quickly.

Teathief

@zerojay I've been using compression for years now admittedly on arch though which means I may have
had a newer version of btrfs then is in debian currently this whole time.

Quite a few power outages during that time its been as a whole 100x more stable then my experience with XFS ever was and that gets recommended for extremely large data deployments (don't know why XFS eats data on any system I've used it on).

My raspberry has the same disk size as my main desktop SSD, 128GB is a little cramped by modern standards but I don't think I'll be riding 90% the whole life of my Pi.

Might be harder on microsd's but frankly isn't ext4 itself known to be extremely rough on microsd storage as well?
Its complained about when it comes to android phones but they just don't expect the phone to be around long enough for it to be a problem.

Fragmentation might be a valid argument but I've never noticed a issue with it, still seems as snappy as when I first put the filesystem on my system.

Just did a fragmentation scan on my drive besides a couple files with 19 and 54 extents 99% of them are sitting at 1 extent.