Since there is a thread about adding ZFS support to the U-Boot build, I thought I'd post a similar request for btrfs.  I was looking through the helios u-boot repo a few days ago and noticed that it isn't built with btrfs support.  While I could make a separate ext4 /boot partition, it would be convenient to have the entire eMMC formatted as btrfs.  This allows for me to make easy and fast backups using btrfs send/receive, and also allows for snapshotting prior to upgrades (via e.g. snapper), and rolling back to a different snapshot at boot.

My turris onmia router uses u-boot with btrfs native root, and I've used the snapshot rollback support a couple of times.  They have a fancy snapshot selection that can be done via the reset button without a serial console, but just having the ability to select previous snapshots at the u-boot menu would be quite convenient.

 

I believe all that is needed is to enable CONFIG_CMD_BTRFS.  https://github.com/u-boot/u-boot/blob/832bfad7451e2e7bd23c96edff2be050905ac3f6/cmd/Kconfig#L2047

 

Thanks for your consideration!

On 11/13/2020 at 10:33 AM, m11k said:

They have a fancy snapshot selection that can be done via the reset button without a serial console

 

That sounds very interesting.  Where can I read more about this?  @m11k I hope you are still active in this forum.

btrfs on Helios4 is now on by default and there is a uboot-btrfs extension to easily enable this for other boards or even at compile time.

Good that this is made default now for various boards. If a board/computer has no factory written bootloader, so only bootROM/maskROM, then this allows way more flexibility and also will get rid of endless topics and support issues that have their root cause in SD-card (failing, or worse fakes, fake brands, etc). As a scrub either done automatically or as support request on-demand/ad-hoc will tell. Also many operations can be done while the board/computer is kept running, no reboot needed. Like transferring rootfs OS from SD-card to NVME and many more great things. Like replacing an SD-card without reboot. Or rollback to know-good older snapshot after faulty update. I see I wrote some things about it here: https://forum.armbian.com/search/?q=CONFIG_CMD_BTRFS&quick=1

 

For boards/computers with factory written bootloader, so PCs with UEFI or BIOS or the strange Raspberries with their boot(EEP)ROM that need a 1st FAT, it is a different story. I figured out that for my computers that already use Btrfs for rootfs for years, even tiny/old RPi0/1, it is currently better alignment, so that I stick to heaving an extra boot partition still. It can be very small, I had defaulted to 40MiB some years ago for a single Linux OS VM (x86 or ARM), but just for some bootaa64.efi file that is already a lot. For RPi, 3MiB was enough, so you store only a bootcode.bin start* fixup* config.txt uboot.bin bootaa64.efi.

 

But that extra boot partition is also easily very confusing, especially for RPi like methods where kernel+initramfs+DTB are copied.

Also, I had Btrfs enabled U-Boot, an Ext4 bootpartition and Btrfs rootpartition while doing experiments (booting from Btrfs raid1 straight from U-Boot) on QEMU and AllwinnerH3. kernel+initramfs+DTB were accidentally read from Ext4 (/) instead of Btrfs (/boot) and more such confusion. So then I recompiled U-Boot without Ext4 (so only FAT,Btrfs), then fine. But generally I would keep Ext4 of course.

With just 1 partition, then those issues are is avoided. Then simply 'U-Boot object' and 'rootfs object', where the latter can still be chosen Ext4.

 

Btrfs U-Boot + rootfs also would make raw/flat images viable maybe. xz-compressed will certainly have smaller download file, but for full desktop variant images, there might be an overall advantage. If rootfs is written by Armbian build with let's say compress-force=zstd:9, only first MBR+bootloader sectors, the Btrfs metadata and some filesystem slack is not compressed. I think some statistics are needed first, maybe it is not worth the effort for mass-downloads also via torrents, mirrors, etc, but for own local builds I certainly see benefits. At least I force compress almost all newly written block-devices, so also a restore from backups. It can keep thin-provisioned volumes/images very small, also roughly halves the write-time for (slower/older) SD-cards.

Edited December 1, 2025Dec 1 by eselarm