Btrfs/Statically built btrfs-progs

btrfs-progs

A rotary spark gap radio transmitter, a type of radio transmitter used during the wireless telegraphy era, circa 1900-1920.

Using the latest version of btrfs-progs is essential for data recovery with tools like btrfs check and to avoid encountering bugs. However, when using a long-term support (LTS) release of a Linux distribution, it's possible that newer btrfs-progs may not be backported. For instance, as of the time of writing, Debian 11 only includes btrfs-progs-5.10.1, while the latest upstream version is btrfs-progs-6.7.1 .

Statically built btrfs-progs

If you can't install the latest btrfs-progs on your system, you can use a statically linked version instead. It has no additional runtime requirements other than the Linux kernel and doesn't need any special installation

Compiling from source

If you want to compile your own btrfs-progs from source, you can find build instructions are available at https://github.com/kdave/btrfs-progs/blob/master/INSTALL

It should be as simple a running the following:

./autogen.sh
./configure --disable-shared --disable-documentation --enable-experimental
make static

The resulting files are

btrfs-convert.static
btrfs-corrupt-block.static
btrfs-find-root.static
btrfs-image.static
btrfs-map-logical.static
btrfs-select-super.static
btrfs.static
btrfsck.static
btrfstune.static
mkfs.btrfs.static

Note: --enable-experimental is needed if you need to test new features, such as --csum conversion.

Prebuilt binaries

One caveat is that compiling btrfs-progs statically also needs external libraries also statically built (e2fsprogs, libuuid, libzstd, libgzip, etc, ...). This may not be possible without a dedicated build-environment.

To make it easier, I have setup a GCC build environment for x86_64 and arm64 platforms.

• x86_64/AMD64 versions are built with CFLAGS="-O2 -march=x86-64" and should work on most 64 bit AMD and Intel systems.
• arm64/aarch64 versions are built with CFLAGS="-O2 -march=armv8-a" and should work on 64 bit ARM v8 platforms.

• riscv64/lp64d versions are built with CFLAGS="-O2 -march=rv64gc -mabi=lp64d" and should work on 64 bit RISC-V platforms based on RV64GC instruction set.

I do not currently have Arm or RISC-V hardware at hand to test the binaries so they have only been tested in a VM under QEMU.

The binaries can downloaded from https://mirrors.tnonline.net/btrfs/btrfs-progs/

DISCLAIMER!

These binaries are not officially supported!

I provide these pre-built binaries as-is with NO WARRANTY. Although I have tested these on my own system, there are no guarantees they work on any other system. They may be broken, cause data corruption, or other severe issues. Always use officially provided btrfs-progs from your Linux distribution when in doubt!

Since btrfs-progs v6.2, statically built versions are directly provided from upstream on the official GitHub page.