Kodi v18 (Leia) testbuilds

[Don Pedro]

(14th Apr, 2018 06:51 PM)Nachteule Wrote:  3) XBian is using BTRFS with LZ4 compression for root partition, so usually you can't read this partition from a standard (windows) system

??? Didn't know you could convince Windoze to access BTRFS!

Whatever, LZ4 is causing problems as almost all Linux systems don't include support for it on BTRFS. The result is always the same, an attempt to mount such an SD card will be rejected with a message that a feature bit is set in the file system that's not supported and you'll end up with a file system that can be read/written excusively by Xbian. I'm wondering why this patch had been included at all (on contrary to all other major distros). It couldn't be size, if the card is too small, well then buy a bigger one, they're not that pricey these days.

I once had the problem that for some unknown reason the BTRFS on the card I use for my Raspi got corrupted (which normally shouldn't happen at all, at least that's why we use a journalling FS). The Raspi did no longer boot from it, it got stuck in the very early boot phase with a respective error message begging for Btrfsck, not giving me a console to trigger that. Probably Btrfsck would've repaired the issue, maybe also a rollback to an older snapshot would've been required, but it should've been possible to reset the FS to a consistent state in a couple of minutes. However the Raspi has no second SD card slot so I couldn't trigger the check from another running helper xbian (couldn't find out if it would've been possible to change the card on the fly). I have a debian machine with tvheadend but it doesn't support LZ4, so I couldn't do the check there. I tried booting a couple of live distros, no success. Finally I got rather pissed with fruitless attempts of fishing around and I decided it will be quicker to simply reinstall xbian. It was in fact faster, however on a Raspi with no additional HDD attached xbian will not do any system backups and the corrupted FS including the snapshots was inaccessible. So I ended up with manualy repeating the complete configuration (which didn't raise my mood).

After making this lousy expierience and lots of cursing I additionally installed syncthing on xbian which I use for backing up all my other machines. It allows me to online sync any changed files to a backup machine which runs nightly dirvish hardlink backup, thus no more manual reconfiguring an xbian installation anymore. So you might understand that in my impression adding LZ4 to BTRFS without any other major distro supporting it is a big peeve and it is unclear to me why there was any neccessity at all to have that feature in the file system.

BR

Don