Scrub

Scrub is a pass over all filesystem data and metadata and verifying the checksums. If a valid copy is available (replicated block group profiles) then the damaged one is repaired. All copies of the replicated profiles are validated.

Note

Scrub is not a filesystem checker (fsck) and does not verify nor repair structural damage in the filesystem. It really only checks checksums of data and tree blocks, it doesn’t ensure the content of tree blocks is valid and consistent. There’s some validation performed when metadata blocks are read from disk (Tree checker) but it’s not extensive and cannot substitute full btrfs-check(8) run.

The user is supposed to run it manually or via a periodic system service. The recommended period is a month but it could be less. The estimated device bandwidth utilization is about 80% on an idle filesystem.

The scrubbing status is recorded in /var/lib/btrfs/ in textual files named scrub.status.UUID for a filesystem identified by the given UUID. (Progress state is communicated through a named pipe in file scrub.progress.UUID in the same directory.) The status file is updated every 5 seconds. A resumed scrub will continue from the last saved position.

Scrub can be started only on a mounted filesystem, though it’s possible to scrub only a selected device. See btrfs scrub start for more.

Bandwidth and IO limiting

Note

The ionice(1) may not be generally supported by all IO schedulers and the options to btrfs scrub start may not work as expected.

In the past when the CFQ IO scheduler was generally used the ionice(1) syscalls set the priority to idle so the IO would not interfere with regular IO. Since the kernel 5.0 the CFQ is not available.

The IO scheduler known to support that is BFQ, but first read the documentation before using it!

For other commonly used schedulers like mq-deadline it’s recommended to use cgroup2 IO controller which could be managed by e.g. systemd (documented in systemd.resource-control). However, starting scrub like that is not yet completely straightforward. The IO controller must know the physical device of the filesystem and create a slice so all processes started from that belong to the same accounting group.

$ systemd-run -p "IOReadBandwidthMax=/dev/sdx 10M" btrfs scrub start -B /

Since linux 5.14 it’s possible to set the per-device bandwidth limits in a BTRFS-specific way using files /sys/fs/btrfs/FSID/devinfo/DEVID/scrub_speed_max. This setting is not persistent, lasts until the filesystem is unmounted. Currently set limits can be displayed by command btrfs scrub limit.

$ echo 100m > /sys/fs/btrfs/9b5fd16e-1b64-4f9b-904a-74e74c0bbadc/devinfo/1/scrub_speed_max
$ btrfs scrub limit /
UUID: 9b5fd16e-1b64-4f9b-904a-74e74c0bbadc
Id      Limit      Path
--  ---------  --------
 1  100.00MiB  /dev/sdx