If you just want to know about my experiment that failed, jump to the last paragraph to skip the history and reasons:
I thought I could just add a line to fstab and mount @stuart (my data files subvolume) under the already mounted @KDEneon_home/stuart/Desktop and I'd be good to go. The result was a VERY significant lag in response time during file operations - Huge delays. This is a new high speed i7-6700K and 16GB RAM, not an old Pentium, but it felt like one. Obviously, something didn't like what I did. Everything seemed to work OK, I haven't had any file corruptions or anything, just killed my system with load. Obviously, nesting btrfs subvolume mounts isn't a good idea. Needless to say I went back to symlinks for now. I think I'll move /home into the install subvolume and eliminate the redundant mount that way. The other issue I've noticed is some programs open file dialogs at /home/<USER> which causes an additionally click when I'm changing wallpaper, for example. There might be a way to re-direct this action to Desktop instead, but for now I'll live with it.
For those who aren't familiar, btrfs is a new file system available to linux users that I have been using for 5 or 6 years now - from back when it was experimental and the tools version was 0.19 (it's now 4.4). I use it full time on all my machines with few exceptions and I hardily recommend it for many reasons as I have in many posts, one of those is the use of subvolumes. Subvolumes act like partitions but they exist on a single file system. In this way they can be mounted individually but they all share the available space in the host file system. If you do an install to a btrfs file system, the Ubuntu default is to install / and /home to separate subvolumes much in the way you might use a separate /home partition.
I'm a multi-booter and have been playing around for various ways to effectively host my personal data files (Docs, Music, etc.) in a shared location while keeping /home unique to each install. This makes sense to me because I want to be able to access my files regardless of which distro I've booted to with the least amount of fuss. I've tried bind mounts and symlinks which all work just fine but you have to do a lot of symlinking or bind mount creation for each install. I wanted a cleaner approach. My personal belief is mixing settings and other various details between distros is a bad idea because you never know what version of what program is going to change a setting and muck up some other installation of the same program on another install.
Last night I decided one way to do this is to move the data folders (Docs, Music, etc.) from /home/<USER> to /home/<USER>/Desktop but in a different location then mount Desktop under /home/<USER>. What this does is make Desktop a separate location accessible with a single mount rather than a slew of symlinks or bind mounts, while leaving /home/<USER> intact to contain settings files and installed stuff - basically all the stuff pertaining to the distro. The only functional change is you might have to click through Desktop to get to Documents rather than having them side-by-side.
btrfs subvolume mounts work in fstab like regular partition mounts except you actually mount the same partition (actually file system) over-and-over again and identify the subvolume with an option entry like this: subvol=@KDEneon_home
I'm a multi-booter and have been playing around for various ways to effectively host my personal data files (Docs, Music, etc.) in a shared location while keeping /home unique to each install. This makes sense to me because I want to be able to access my files regardless of which distro I've booted to with the least amount of fuss. I've tried bind mounts and symlinks which all work just fine but you have to do a lot of symlinking or bind mount creation for each install. I wanted a cleaner approach. My personal belief is mixing settings and other various details between distros is a bad idea because you never know what version of what program is going to change a setting and muck up some other installation of the same program on another install.
Last night I decided one way to do this is to move the data folders (Docs, Music, etc.) from /home/<USER> to /home/<USER>/Desktop but in a different location then mount Desktop under /home/<USER>. What this does is make Desktop a separate location accessible with a single mount rather than a slew of symlinks or bind mounts, while leaving /home/<USER> intact to contain settings files and installed stuff - basically all the stuff pertaining to the distro. The only functional change is you might have to click through Desktop to get to Documents rather than having them side-by-side.
btrfs subvolume mounts work in fstab like regular partition mounts except you actually mount the same partition (actually file system) over-and-over again and identify the subvolume with an option entry like this: subvol=@KDEneon_home
I thought I could just add a line to fstab and mount @stuart (my data files subvolume) under the already mounted @KDEneon_home/stuart/Desktop and I'd be good to go. The result was a VERY significant lag in response time during file operations - Huge delays. This is a new high speed i7-6700K and 16GB RAM, not an old Pentium, but it felt like one. Obviously, something didn't like what I did. Everything seemed to work OK, I haven't had any file corruptions or anything, just killed my system with load. Obviously, nesting btrfs subvolume mounts isn't a good idea. Needless to say I went back to symlinks for now. I think I'll move /home into the install subvolume and eliminate the redundant mount that way. The other issue I've noticed is some programs open file dialogs at /home/<USER> which causes an additionally click when I'm changing wallpaper, for example. There might be a way to re-direct this action to Desktop instead, but for now I'll live with it.
Comment