Feature Request - BTRFS with LVM

[falkob]

Hi all,

I had a special situation where I needed to use the Veeam Agent for Linux for a VMware virtual machine.
The VM was installed with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15.1 and used Intel Optane, which makes it impossible to snapshot:
https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphe ... 88613.html

Snapshots are not supported with PCI vSphere DirectPath I/O devices.

So in this case I had to use the Veeam Agent for Linux to achieve a correct backup and of course a correct restore with the recovery .iso for bare metal operating system recovery.
When I tried booting from the recovery media and do a bare metal recovery I saw the partitions and so on, but the boot flag was missing:



Normally it should look something like this:



Due to the Veeam Helpcenter for Veeam Agent for Linux BTRFS is supported, but without it residing on a LVM.
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/agent ... tml?ver=40

The supported file system (except for Btrfs) can reside on a simple volume or LVM2 volume

The fact that in this case it’s the root partition which cannot be restored now leads to the situation that the machine cannot boot at all (there is no kernel to boot from or at least the machine doesn't know where after restore) because of that "unsupported configuration"

It is definetely another discussion why you would use btrfs together with LVM, but in fact it is a default setting while installing SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15.1, which I encountered today.
Here is a screenshot of a default "next next finish" partitioning setup which got created by default from the partitioning manager i did today.



Any plans on supporting this in the future ?
I can imagine that it is not easy to correctly detect and restore the bootloader of a btrfs filesystem residing on a LVM.
I just created the feature request here, because I'm kind of scared and really don't want to know how many SLES servers are installed with these default partiotining settings out in the field.

Thanks !

[PTide]

Hi,

Well, you are probably the first one to come with such request, which means that there was no roadmap for this feature until now.

Also I am very curious whether you just overlooked that BTRFS pver LVM was a default, or you left it as is intentionally? : )

Thanks!

[falkob]

Hey PTide,
didn't overlook that, I just did not know until I tested it myself, that this is a default partitioning setting while installing SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15.1.
And like described in the intro, I had a customer with that exact system setup, where I needed to use the Veeam Agent for Linux because of Intel Optane. I did not install that system

Thanks and Best Regards !

[helly.wu]

Feature Request - BTRFS with LVM +1

SuSE15sp2 , Brtfs file system running on LVM volume .