Home windows on btrfs – The Cool Weblog
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So for the previous 12 months and a half or so I have been utilizing the unbelievable Windows btrfs driver for simply sharing recordsdata between my Home windows and Linux dualboot. The driving force works nice and principally totally helps every part that each working techniques might ever need (and let me let you know clear compression and duplicate on write on Home windows is so fucking good). In case you dualboot Home windows and Linux I extremely advocate utilizing this for exterior drives as an alternative of utilizing NTFS with Linux.
Anyway maharmstone, the creator of the motive force, has additionally been engaged on one other challenge known as Quibble. Quibble is an open supply reimplentation of the Home windows bootloader that has the extremely superior characteristic of permitting one besides Home windows off of different filesystems. It may boot it off of something that it has an EFI driver for and that Home windows can learn. Theoretically nothing is stopping you from booting Home windows 11 off of FAT32 (Though I am certain that Home windows would have some points with that as XP was the final model that allow you to boot off of FAT32)
Quibble has been one thing that I had beforehand messed with up to now however might by no means get to work. The final launch had been from 2021 and I by no means cared sufficient to really compile the a lot newer supply sode. Just a few weeks in the past although there was a brand new launch so I although fuck it and determined to strive it. I downloaded the newest launch of Quibble, caught it in my EFI partition, used their ntfs2btrfs device to transform my current Home windows partition to btrfs, edited the Quibble config file to level to the suitable partition and rebooted… and instantly forgot this laptop computer’s dumbass UEFI does not let me choose an EFI file besides from. After 10 minutes of me making an attempt to recollect use efibootmgr I used to be ready so as to add it to the boot choices and truly reboot.
The boot menu of Quibble appears to be like like for those who took grub, made it HiDPI conscious, and added nicer fonts. Contemplating my failed makes an attempt up to now the place it could by no means discover the partition I wasn’t anticipating a lot once I chosen Home windows.
Holy shit it really fucking labored.
I actually wasn’t anticipating it to work. Effectively since we’re on the login display I signed in and was instantly listening to error sounds even earlier than the desktop loaded. I forgot to take screenshots nevertheless it was the AMD stuff from the Microsoft Retailer failing to launch. This takes us into the one draw back (or characteristic relying on the way you see it). “Home windows 10 apps”, principally stuff you would get from the Microsoft Retailer do not work. Your first thought could be “who cares no person will get something from the Microsoft Retailer” however because of this Home windows Terminal does not work and also you’re caught with the shitty default powershell and command immediate apps and I am unable to play Minecraft Bedrock.
Oh effectively…
Anyway with it seemingly working completely I rebooted into Arch Linux so I might do clear compression on this. This was once I realized that the ntfs2btrfs program did not do issues completely. Instantly once I tried to put in writing something to it dmesg was crammed with errors and the filesystem remounted as learn solely. As I’m an fool I did not actually know the way I might repair this in the mean time. Btrfs test stated every part was advantageous.
I made a decision to make a brand new btrfs partition and simply copy over all of the recordsdata and see if that will boot. I used to be shocked to see that it did and now that I had a clear and uncorrupted filesystem it was time for the extremely dumb thought I had.
There aren’t any directories within the Home windows and Linux roots that share the identical title so it is best to have the ability to boot them each from the identical partition with none file conflicts. After a reboot into Linux, putting in Arch with pacstrap, and fucking with grub.
This kinda simply works. The btrfs driver for Home windows is extremely strong so when you get previous the bootloader there actually is not something bizarre. It simply does its factor. One last considered mine is that since Quibble helps booting Home windows from a btrfs subvolume for those who wished to not have to fret about splitting up your SSD for a twin boot you possibly can have Home windows and Linux on one partition on separate subvolumes. Truthfully that appears like one thing I would do (Assuming Home windows Replace does not break this).
Anyway that is all I’ve this time. This was only a dumb factor I ended up doing tonight and I actually wanted one thing to put in writing about.
I do not know finish issues.
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