1. mount options

2. filesystem features

3. checksum algorithms

4. filesystem exclusive operations

5. filesystem limits

6. bootloader support

7. file attributes

8. control device

9. filesystems with multiple block group profiles

Note

most mount options apply to the whole filesystem and only options in the first mounted subvolume will take effect. This is due to lack of implementation and may change in the future. This means that (for example) you can’t set per-subvolume nodatacow, nodatasum, or compress using mount options. This should eventually be fixed, but it has proved to be difficult to implement correctly within the Linux VFS framework.

(default: on)

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

The support for ACL is build-time configurable (BTRFS_FS_POSIX_ACL) and mount fails if acl is requested but the feature is not compiled in.

(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.

(default: on)

Ensure that all IO write operations make it through the device cache and are stored permanently when the filesystem is at its 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 a 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.

(since: 3.0, default: off)

These debugging options control the behavior of the integrity checking module (the BTRFS_FS_CHECK_INTEGRITY config option required). The main goal is to verify that all blocks from a given transaction period are properly linked.

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 information.

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

(since: 3.12, default: 30)

Set the interval of periodic transaction commit when data are synchronized to permanent storage. Higher interval values lead to larger amount of unwritten data, which has 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). Use with care.

(default: off, level support since: 5.1)

Control BTRFS file data compression. Type may be specified as zlib, lzo, zstd or no (for no compression, used for remounting). If no type is specified, zlib is used. If compress-force is specified, then compression will always be attempted, but the data may end up uncompressed if the compression would make them larger.

Both zlib and zstd (since version 5.1) expose the compression level as a tunable knob with higher levels trading speed and memory (zstd) for higher compression ratios. This can be set by appending a colon and the desired level. Zlib accepts the range [1, 9] and zstd accepts [1, 15]. If no level is set, both currently use a default level of 3. The value 0 is an alias for the default level.

Otherwise some simple heuristics are applied to detect an incompressible file. If the first blocks written to a file are not compressible, the whole file is permanently marked to skip compression. As this is too simple, the compress-force is a workaround that will compress most of the files at the cost of some wasted CPU cycles on failed attempts. Since kernel 4.15, a set of heuristic algorithms have been improved by using frequency sampling, repeated pattern detection and Shannon entropy calculation to avoid that.

(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)).

Updates in-place improve performance for workloads that do frequent overwrites, at the cost of potential partial writes, in case the write is interrupted (system crash, device failure).

(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)).

There is a slight performance gain when checksums are turned off, the corresponding metadata blocks holding the checksums do not need to updated. The cost of checksumming of the blocks in memory is much lower than the IO, modern CPUs feature hardware support of the checksumming algorithm.

(default: off)

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

Since 4.14, the constraint checks have been improved and are verified on the chunk level, not an the device level. This allows degraded mounts of filesystems with mixed RAID profiles for data and metadata, even if the device number constraints would not be satisfied for some of the profiles.

Example: metadata — raid1, data — single, devices — /dev/sda, /dev/sdb

Suppose the data are completely stored on sda, then missing sdb will not prevent the mount, even if 1 missing device would normally prevent (any) single profile to mount. In case some of the data chunks are stored on sdb, then the constraint of single/data is not satisfied and the filesystem cannot be mounted.

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.

(default: off, async support since: 5.6)

Enable discarding of freed file blocks. This is useful for SSD devices, thinly provisioned LUNs, or virtual machine images; however, every storage layer must support discard for it to work.

In the synchronous mode (sync or without option value), lack of asynchronous queued TRIM on the backing device TRIM can severely degrade performance, because a synchronous TRIM operation will be attempted instead. Queued TRIM requires newer than SATA revision 3.1 chipsets and devices.

The asynchronous mode (async) gathers extents in larger chunks before sending them to the devices for TRIM. The overhead and performance impact should be negligible compared to the previous mode and it’s supposed to be the preferred mode if needed.

If it is not necessary to immediately discard freed blocks, then the fstrim tool can be used to discard all free blocks in a batch. Scheduling a TRIM during a period of low system activity will prevent latent interference with the performance of other operations. Also, a device may ignore the TRIM command if the range is too small, so running a batch discard has a greater probability of actually discarding the blocks.

(default: off)

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

(since: 3.4, default: bug)

Action to take when encountering a fatal error.

bug

panic

(default: off)

This option forces any data dirtied by a write in a prior transaction to commit as part of the current commit, effectively a full filesystem sync.

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.

When off, the filesystem is consistent but buffered writes may last more than one transaction commit.

(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.

(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.

Don’t use this option unless you really need it. The inode number limit on 64bit system is 264, which is practically enough for the whole filesystem lifetime. Due to implementation of linux VFS layer, the inode numbers on 32bit systems are only 32 bits wide. This lowers the limit significantly and makes it possible to reach it. In such case, this mount option will help. Alternatively, files with high inode numbers can be copied to a new subvolume which will effectively start the inode numbers from the beginning again.

(default: off, even read-only)

The tree-log contains pending updates to the filesystem until the full commit. The log is replayed on next mount, this can be disabled by this option. See also treelog. Note that nologreplay is the same as norecovery.

(default: min(2048, page size) )

Specify the maximum amount of space, 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, maximum size of inline data is about 3900 bytes.

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

(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 enough 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).

(since: 4.5, default: off)

Do not attempt any data recovery at mount time. This will disable logreplay and avoids other write operations. Note that this option is the same as nologreplay.

(since: 3.12, default: off)

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

(since: 3.3, default: off)

Skip automatic resume of an interrupted balance operation. The operation can later be resumed with btrfs balance resume, or the paused state can be removed with btrfs balance cancel. The default behaviour is to resume an interrupted balance immediately after a volume is mounted.

(nospace_cache since: 3.2, space_cache=v1 and space_cache=v2 since 4.5, default: space_cache=v1)

Options to control the free space cache. The free space cache greatly improves performance when reading block group free space into memory. However, managing the space cache consumes some resources, including a small amount of disk space.

There are two implementations of the free space cache. The original one, referred to as v1, is the safe default. The v1 space cache can be disabled at mount time with nospace_cache without clearing.

On very large filesystems (many terabytes) and certain workloads, the performance of the v1 space cache may degrade drastically. The v2 implementation, which adds a new B-tree called the free space tree, addresses this issue. Once enabled, the v2 space cache will always be used and cannot be disabled unless it is cleared. Use clear_cache,space_cache=v1 or clear_cache,nospace_cache to do so. If v2 is enabled, kernels without v2 support will only be able to mount the filesystem in read-only mode. The btrfs(8) command currently only has read-only support for v2. A read-write command may be run on a v2 filesystem by clearing the cache, running the command, and then remounting with space_cache=v2.

If a version is not explicitly specified, the default implementation will be chosen, which is v1.

(default: SSD autodetected)

Options to control SSD allocation schemes. By default, BTRFS will enable or disable SSD optimizations depending on status of a device with respect to rotational or non-rotational type. This is determined by the contents of /sys/block/DEV/queue/rotational). If it is 0, the ssd option is turned on. The option nossd will disable the autodetection.

The optimizations make use of the absence of the seek penalty that’s inherent for the rotational devices. The blocks can be typically written faster and are not offloaded to separate threads.

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. The option nossd will disable all SSD options while nossd_spread only disables ssd_spread.

Mount subvolume from path rather than the toplevel subvolume. The path is always treated as relative to the toplevel subvolume. This mount option overrides the default subvolume set for the given filesystem.

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

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

The number of worker threads to start. 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 hit due to increased locking contention, process scheduling, cache-line bouncing or costly data transfers between local CPU memories.

(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.

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

(since: 4.6, 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.

(default: off)

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

This is namely for core structures, like the b-tree nodesize or checksum algorithm, see mkfs.btrfs(8) for more details.

Features that may optimize internal structures or add new structures to support new functionality, see btrfstune(8). The command btrfs inspect-internal dump-super device will dump a superblock, you can map the value of incompat_flags to the features listed below

The features of a filesystem (with a given UUID) are listed in /sys/fs/btrfs/UUID/features/, one file per feature. The status is stored inside the file. The value 1 is for enabled and active, while 0 means the feature was enabled at mount time but turned off afterwards.

Whether a particular feature can be turned on a mounted filesystem can be found in the directory /sys/fs/btrfs/features/, one file per feature. The value 1 means the feature can be enabled.

(since: 3.4)

the filesystem uses nodesize for metadata blocks, this can be bigger than the page size

(since: 2.6.38)

the lzo compression has been used on the filesystem, either as a mount option or via btrfs filesystem defrag.

(since: 4.14)

the zstd compression has been used on the filesystem, either as a mount option or via btrfs filesystem defrag.

(since: 2.6.34)

the default subvolume has been set on the filesystem

(since: 3.7)

increased hardlink limit per file in a directory to 65536, older kernels supported a varying number of hardlinks depending on the sum of all file name sizes that can be stored into one metadata block

(since: 4.5)

free space representation using a dedicated b-tree, successor of v1 space cache

(since: 5.0)

the main filesystem UUID is the metadata_uuid, which stores the new UUID only in the superblock while all metadata blocks still have the UUID set at mkfs time, see btrfstune(8) for more

(since: 2.6.31)

the last major disk format change, improved backreferences, now default

(since: 2.6.37)

mixed data and metadata block groups, ie. the data and metadata are not separated and occupy the same block groups, this mode is suitable for small volumes as there are no constraints how the remaining space should be used (compared to the split mode, where empty metadata space cannot be used for data and vice versa)

on the other hand, the final layout is quite unpredictable and possibly highly fragmented, which means worse performance

(since: 3.14)

improved representation of file extents where holes are not explicitly stored as an extent, saves a few percent of metadata if sparse files are used

(since: 5.5)

extended RAID1 mode with copies on 3 or 4 devices respectively

(since: 3.9)

the filesystem contains or contained a raid56 profile of block groups

(since: 4.18)

indicate that rmdir(2) syscall can delete an empty subvolume just like an ordinary directory. Note that this feature only depends on the kernel version.

(since: 3.10)

reduced-size metadata for extent references, saves a few percent of metadata

(since: 5.5)

list of checksum algorithms supported by the kernel module, the respective modules or built-in implementing the algorithms need to be present to mount the filesystem

# truncate -s 0 swapfile
# chattr +C swapfile
# fallocate -l 2G swapfile
# chmod 0600 swapfile
# mkswap swapfile
# swapon swapfile

default, best backward compatibility, very fast, modern CPUs have instruction-level support, not collision-resistant but still good error detection capabilities

can be used as CRC32C successor, very fast, optimized for modern CPUs utilizing instruction pipelining, good collision resistance and error detection

a cryptographic-strength hash, relatively slow but with possible CPU instruction acceleration or specialized hardware cards, FIPS certified and in wide use

a cryptographic-strength hash, relatively fast with possible CPU acceleration using SIMD extensions, not standardized but based on BLAKE which was a SHA3 finalist, in wide use, the algorithm used is BLAKE2b-256 that’s optimized for 64bit platforms

• balance

• device add

• device delete

• device replace

• resize

• swapfile activate

• none

255

depends on the nodesize value, for 4k it’s 3949 bytes, for larger nodesize it’s 4095 due to the system limit PATH_MAX

The symlink target may not be a valid path, ie. the path name components can exceed the limits (NAME_MAX), there’s no content validation at symlink(3) creation.

264 but depends on the available metadata space as the inodes are created dynamically

minimum number: 256 (for subvolumes), regular files and directories: 257

inherent limit of btrfs is 264 (16 EiB) but the linux VFS limit is 263 (8 EiB)

the subvolume ids can go up to 264 but the number of actual subvolumes depends on the available metadata space, the space consumed by all subvolume metadata includes bookkeeping of shared extents can be large (MiB, GiB)

65536 when the extref feature is turned on during mkfs (default), roughly 100 otherwise

the minimal size of each device depends on the mixed-bg feature, without that (the default) it’s about 109MiB, with mixed-bg it’s is 16MiB

• attributes: chattr(1) or lsattr(1) utilities (the ioctls are FS_IOC_GETFLAGS and FS_IOC_SETFLAGS), due to the ioctl names the attributes are also called flags

• xflags: to distinguish from the previous, it’s extended flags, with tunable bits similar to the attributes but extensible and new bits will be added in the future (the ioctls are FS_IOC_FSGETXATTR and FS_IOC_FSSETXATTR but they are not related to extended attributes that are also called xattrs), there’s no standard tool to change the bits, there’s support in xfs_io(8) as command xfs_io -c chattr

$ ls -l /dev/btrfs-control
crw------- 1 root root 10, 234 Jan  1 12:00 /dev/btrfs-control

• scan devices for btrfs filesystem (ie. to let multi-device filesystems mount automatically) and register them with the kernel module

• similar to scan, but also wait until the device scanning process is finished for a given filesystem

• get the supported features (can be also found under /sys/fs/btrfs/features)

# mknod --mode=600 /dev/btrfs-control c 10 234

WARNING: Multiple block group profiles detected, see 'man btrfs(5)'.
WARNING:   Data: single, raid1
WARNING:   Metadata: single, raid1

WARNING: Multiple block group profiles detected, see 'man btrfs(5)'.
WARNING:   Data: single, raid1
WARNING:   Metadata: single, raid1
Data, RAID1: total=832.00MiB, used=0.00B
Data, single: total=1.63GiB, used=0.00B
System, single: total=4.00MiB, used=16.00KiB
Metadata, single: total=8.00MiB, used=112.00KiB
Metadata, RAID1: total=64.00MiB, used=32.00KiB
GlobalReserve, single: total=16.25MiB, used=0.00B

Note

If you’re familiar with balance filters, you can use convert=raid1,profiles=single,soft, which will take only the unconverted single profiles and convert them to raid1. This may speed up the conversion as it would not try to rewrite the already convert raid1 profiles.

    Multiple profiles:                 yes (data, metadata)