I have been installing Fedora 20 on my new SSD with btrfs (I want checksums). I did the install in kvm with the SSD attached directly to the VM. It’s my favorite way to install new systems now; I can keep working while installing, updating, and configuring the new install until I am ready to switch over with hardly more downtime than a reboot.

Anaconda support for btrfs has been painful so far. I had intentionally partitioned the drive the way I wanted, but then anaconda would not let me put btrfs volumes on existing partitions. I then deleted all but the /boot partition and let anaconda do the partitioning the way it wanted, and it failed to find a boot device when I rebooted (I think my own fault; see below). Trying again to reinstall, I tried to re-use the btrfs devices in “manual partitioning” mode and it says “You must create a new filesystem on the root devices” but keeps the “Reformat” box greyed out so I can’t do so. Therefore, I gave up on trying a reinstall.

Now, I can’t find any issues in bugzilla related to reinstalling over btrfs root filesystem, which makes me wonder if I’m just missing something about the new anaconda. Or is it that practically no one is using btrfs on Fedora? I don’t mind filing bugs but I hate to distract people with bugs that aren’t bugs.

The boot problem I ran into seems to have been caused by me trying to be too clever by half: To make the install look more like it will when I switch the drive to be my primary drive, I had tried the “SATA” disk bus in kvm instead of virtio, which installed fine but wouldn’t boot. Switching to virtio allowed it to boot. I don’t know why it mattered. Not sure it’s a bug, and if it’s a bug, it’s a bug on the host side, not the guest side…

Going to virtio solved the boot problem, and my SSD-based F20 instance is currently applying 577 updates. This is going to take a while. Then I’ll figure out what packages I am currently missing and add those. In the meantime, I’m able to keep using the computer for everything else.

James Davidson March 15, 2014 17:41

Are you installing to a separate partition than the one you are running in? Just curious how you pull off the running and installing on the same SSD at the same time.

Michael K Johnson March 15, 2014 17:44

I’m running only on the old rotational drive sda. I’m installing only on new SSD sdb. The iso image is a file on a filesystem on sda. No filesystem or device conflicts.

James Davidson March 15, 2014 18:07

Got it. I was envisioning a much more exotic setup.

Imported from Google+ — content and formatting may not be reliable