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Caveats with compression and fallocate #976

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btrfs compress doc: clarify compress-force mount option
jimis Apr 4, 2025
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btrfs compress doc: mention that fallocate disables compression
jimis Apr 4, 2025
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26 changes: 22 additions & 4 deletions Documentation/ch-compression.rst
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Expand Up @@ -98,16 +98,34 @@ more CPU the system performance is affected.
Level 0 always maps to the default. The compression level does not affect
compatibility.

Exceptions
----------

Any file that has been touched by the *fallocate* system call will always be
excepted from compression even if *force-compress* mount option is used.

The reason for this is that a successful *fallocate* call must guarantee that
future writes to the allocated range will not fail because of lack of space.
This is difficult to guarantee in a COW filesystem. To reduce the chances of
it happening, btrfs preallocates space and disables compression for the file.

As a workaround, one can trigger a compressed rewrite for such a file using the
*btrfs defrag* command. Be aware that if the file is touched again by the
*fallocate* system call, it will be excepted again from compression for all the
new data written to it.


Incompressible data
-------------------

Files with already compressed data or with data that won't compress well with
the CPU and memory constraints of the kernel implementations are using a simple
decision logic. If the first portion of data being compressed is not smaller
than the original, the compression of the file is disabled -- unless the
filesystem is mounted with *compress-force*. In that case compression will
always be attempted on the file only to be later discarded. This is not optimal
and subject to optimizations and further development.
than the original, the compression of the whole file is disabled. Unless the
filesystem is mounted with *compress-force* in which case btrfs will try
compressing every block, falling back to storing the uncompressed version for
each block that ends up larger after compression. This is not optimal and
subject to optimizations and further development.

If a file is identified as incompressible, a flag is set (*NOCOMPRESS*) and it's
sticky. On that file compression won't be performed unless forced. The flag
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