Enable/disable support for Posix Access Control Lists (ACLs). See the acl(5) manual page for more information about ACLs.

The support for ACL is build-time configurable (BTRFS_FS_POSIX_ACL) and mount fails if acl is requested but the feature is not compiled in.

Debugging option to force all block allocations above a certain byte threshold on each block device. The value is specified in bytes, optionally with a K, M, or G suffix (case insensitive).

This option was used for testing and has no practical use, it’s slated to be removed in the future.

Enable automatic file defragmentation. When enabled, small random writes into files (in a range of tens of kilobytes, currently it’s 64K) are detected and queued up for the defragmentation process. Not well suited for large database workloads.

The read latency may increase due to reading the adjacent blocks that make up the range for defragmentation, successive write will merge the blocks in the new location.

Ensure that all IO write operations make it through the device cache and are stored permanently when the filesystem is at it’s consistency checkpoint. This typically means that a flush command is sent to the device that will synchronize all pending data and ordinary metadata blocks, then writes the superblock and issues another flush.

The write flushes incur a slight hit and also prevent the IO block scheduler to reorder requests in a more effective way. Disabling barriers gets rid of that penalty but will most certainly lead to a corrupted filesystem in case of a crash or power loss. The ordinary metadata blocks could be yet unwritten at the time the new superblock is stored permanently, expecting that the block pointers to metadata were stored permanently before.

On a device with a volatile battery-backed write-back cache, the nobarrier option will not lead to filesystem corruption as the pending blocks are supposed to make it to the permanent storage.

These debugging options control the behavior of the integrity checking module (the BTRFS_FS_CHECK_INTEGRITY config option required).

check_int enables the integrity checker module, which examines all block write requests to ensure on-disk consistency, at a large memory and CPU cost.

check_int_data includes extent data in the integrity checks, and implies the check_int option.

check_int_print_mask takes a bitmask of BTRFSIC_PRINT_MASK_* values as defined in fs/btrfs/check-integrity.c, to control the integrity checker module behavior.

See comments at the top of fs/btrfs/check-integrity.c for more info.

Set the interval of periodic commit. Higher values defer data being synced to permanent storage with obvious consequences when the system crashes. The upper bound is not forced, but a warning is printed if it’s more than 300 seconds (5 minutes).

Control BTRFS file data compression. Type may be specified as zlib, lzo or no (for no compression, used for remounting). If no type is specified, zlib is used. If compress-force is specified, all files will be compressed, whether or not they compress well. Otherwise some simple heuristics are applied to detect an incompressible file. If the first blocks written to a file are not compressible, the whole file is permanently marked to skip compression.

Enable data copy-on-write for newly created files. Nodatacow implies nodatasum, and disables compression. All files created under nodatacow are also set the NOCOW file attribute (see chattr(1)).

Enable data checksumming for newly created files. Datasum implies datacow, ie. the normal mode of operation. All files created under nodatasum inherit the "no checksums" property, however there’s no corresponding file attribute (see chattr(1)).

Allow mounts with less devices than the raid profile constraints require. A read-write mount (or remount) may fail with too many devices missing, for example if a stripe member is completely missing from RAID0.

Enable discarding of freed file blocks using TRIM operation. This is useful for SSD devices, thinly provisioned LUNs or virtual machine images where the backing device understands the operation. Depending on support of the underlying device, the operation may severely hurt performance in case the TRIM operation is synchronous (eg. with SATA devices up to revision 3.0).

If discarding is not necessary to be done at the block freeing time, there’s fstrim tool that lets the filesystem discard all free blocks in a batch, possibly not much interfering with other operations. Also, the the device may ignore the TRIM command if the range is too small, so running the batch discard can actually discard the blocks.

Enable verbose output for some ENOSPC conditions. It’s safe to use but can be noisy if the system reaches near-full state.

Action to take when encountering a fatal error.

bug

panic

This option forces any data dirtied by a write in a prior transaction to commit as part of the current commit, effectively a full filesystem sync.

This makes the committed state a fully consistent view of the file system from the application’s perspective (i.e., it includes all completed file system operations). This was previously the behavior only when a snapshot was created.

When off, the filesystem is consistent but buffered writes may last more than one transaction commit.

A debugging helper to intentionally fragment given type of block groups. The type can be data, metadata or all. This mount option should not be used outside of debugging environments and is not recognized if the kernel config option BTRFS_DEBUG is not enabled.

Enable free inode number caching. Not recommended to use unless files on your filesystem get assigned inode numbers that are approaching 264. Normally, new files in each subvolume get assigned incrementally (plus one from the last time) and are not reused. The mount option turns on caching of the existing inode numbers and reuse of inode numbers of deleted files.

This option may slow down your system at first run, or after mounting without the option.

Enable/disable log replay at mount time. See also treelog.

Specify the maximum amount of space, in bytes, that can be inlined in a metadata B-tree leaf. The value is specified in bytes, optionally with a K suffix (case insensitive). In practice, this value is limited by the filesystem block size (named sectorsize at mkfs time), and memory page size of the system. In case of sectorsize limit, there’s some space unavailable due to leaf headers. For example, a 4k sectorsize, maximum size of inline data is about 3900 bytes.

Inlining can be completely turned off by specifying 0. This will increase data block slack if file sizes are much smaller than block size but will reduce metadata consumption in return.

Specifies that 1 metadata chunk should be allocated after every value data chunks. Default behaviour depends on internal logic, some percent of unused metadata space is attempted to be maintained but is not always possible if there’s not enough space left for chunk allocation. The option could be useful to override the internal logic in favor of the metadata allocation if the expected workload is supposed to be metadata intense (snapshots, reflinks, xattrs, inlined files).

Do not attempt any data recovery at mount time. This will disable logreplay and avoids other write operations.

Force check and rebuild procedure of the UUID tree. This should not normally be needed.

Skip automatic resume of interrupted balance operation after mount. May be resumed with btrfs balance resume or the paused state can be removed by btrfs balance cancel. The default behaviour is to start interrutpd balance.

Options to control the free space cache. This affects performance as searching for new free blocks could take longer if the space cache is not enabled. On the other hand, managing the space cache consumes some resources. It can be disabled without clearing at mount time.

There are two implementations of how the space is tracked. The safe default is v1. On large filesystems (many-terabytes) and certain workloads the v1 performance may degrade. This problem is addressed by v2, that is based on b-trees, sometimes referred to as free-space-tree.

Compatibility notes:

Options to control SSD allocation schemes. By default, BTRFS will enable or disable SSD allocation heuristics depending on whether a rotational or non-rotational disk is in use (contents of /sys/block/DEV/queue/rotational). The ssd and nossd options can override this autodetection.

The ssd_spread mount option attempts to allocate into bigger and aligned chunks of unused space, and may perform better on low-end SSDs. ssd_spread implies ssd, enabling all other SSD heuristics as well.

A workaround option from times (pre 3.2) when it was not possible to mount a subvolume that did not reside directly under the toplevel subvolume.

The number of worker threads to allocate. NRCPUS is number of on-line CPUs detected at the time of mount. Small number leads to less parallelism in processing data and metadata, higher numbers could lead to a performance hit due to increased locking contention, cache-line bouncing or costly data transfers between local CPU memories.

Enable the tree logging used for fsync and O_SYNC writes. The tree log stores changes without the need of a full filesystem sync. The log operations are flushed at sync and transaction commit. If the system crashes between two such syncs, the pending tree log operations are replayed during mount.

Allow subvolumes to be deleted by their respective owner. Otherwise, only the root user can do that.

Whether a particular feature can be turned on a mounted filesystem can be found in the directory /sys/fs/btrfs/features/, one file per feature. The value 1 means the feature can be enabled.

the filesystem uses nodesize bigger than the page size compress_lzo:: (since: 2.6.38)

the lzo compression has been used on the filesystem, either as a mount option or via btrfs filesystem defrag.

the default subvolume has been set on the filesystem

increased hardlink limit per file in a directory to 65536, older kernels supported a varying number of hardlinks depending on the sum of all file name sizes that can be stored into one metadata block

the last major disk format change, improved backreferences

mixed data and metadata block groups, ie. the data and metadata are not separated and occupy the same block groups, this mode is suitable for small volumes as there are no constraints how the remaining space should be used (compared to the split mode, where empty metadata space cannot be used for data and vice versa)

on the other hand, the final layout is quite unpredictable and possibly highly fragmented, which means worse performance

the filesystem contains or contained a raid56 profile of block groups

reduced-size metadata for extent references, saves a few percent of metadata

When set on a directory, all newly created files will inherit this attribute.

When set on a directory, all newly created files will inherit this attribute.

When set on a directory, all newly created files will inherit this attribute.

$ ls -l /dev/btrfs-control
crw------- 1 root root 10, 234 Jan  1 12:00 /dev/btrfs-control

# mknod --mode=600 c 10 234 /dev/btrfs-control