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Comment by cyphar | Hacker News Reader

If you used Docker on your machine, this was a bug in the remount code (they forgot to re-trigger the qgroup scan if it was interrupted when you did an rw-remount) which I fixed several years ago[1]. I don't know what that will do for your confidence in btrfs, but hopefully it'll give you some closure.

[1]: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

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The incident with my Linux laptop was definitely not Docker-related, but the description of the issue sounds like it could still apply.

We didn't use Docker at work, at least not on the VMs that I was affected by. This one was a gradual degradation over time - the maintenance process would run fine, but after a while it would start hanging the machine. It really felt like the fs was only good for some amount of writes before the maintenance process got overwhelmed and would hang the VM whenever it ran.

I'm happy to see that things are getting better, but the reputational damage will take a long time to repair.

All that being said, I still use btrfs on my Linux laptop, but I've also become more conscientious about backing it up.

I was told a while ago that rebalancing could get into pathological cases fairly easily (on openSUSE we used to run a rebalance in a cron job and it turns out this would grind machines to a halt). I still use btrfs and haven't had this issue for several years so maybe the issue has been resolved? I'm not sure what the resolution might have been.

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