Can't enable Quotas

simon-77 · October 13, 2025, 2:44pm

Hi again,

I was playing around with the Quotas on my main server, in order to have a better overview of the size of all the shares.

I had the Quotas disabled for a while now, and would like to enable them now. Unfortunately the Rockstor UI always show the “Quotas” setting as Disabled, even when I enable the quotas via the commandline.

Furthermore, loading the web UI (e.g. Dashboard) will trigger endless btrfs quota rescans under the hood.

Some things I have tried:

In the web UI under Storage > Pools: enable the Quotas via drop-down menu
Result:
when reloading the web UI, they are still “Disabled”. Even when waiting for a night.
Disabling quotas again & enabling them via cli

sudo btrfs quota enable <path>

This automatically triggers a btrfs quota rescan that can be monitored by

# Se if rescan is active
sudo btrfs quota rescan -s <path>

# Wait for current rescen to finish
sudo btrfs quota rescan -W <path>

After a while the rescan is done and calling the above commands will evidently show, that no rescan is active.

As a result, the size of all subvolumes can be viewed from the command line

sudo btrfs qgroup show <path>

I then once again verified, that no quota scans are active and opened the Rockstor web-UI. Within a few seconds, another quota rescan is triggered …

… and the web-UI still shows the “Quotas” as “Disabled”.

… also enabling the Quotas once again through the web-UI does not change the behavior.

… also rebooting the server didn’t change anything.

As long as the web UI is open (even the Dashboard), the BTRFS quotas is constantly rescanned. Also shown by dmesg:

Some other information:

A few days ago, I made a fresh rockstor installation on a backup server. It had the Quotas Enabled and they do work there correctly (without constant quota rescans)

Version: Rockstor 5.1.0-0 built on Leap 15.6

Cheers Simon

Hooverdan · October 13, 2025, 4:00pm

re:

I linked this post to an issue that has been looked at and changed in the past, but this area will need some more attention (which was not that important to date, mostly because of the maturity level of quotas in general):

github.com/rockstor/rockstor-core

[Enhancement] Increase number of btrfs quotas rescan

opened 11:51PM - 23 Jan 17 UTC

MFlyer

While checking over shares usage found we perform quota rescan only while creati…ng snapshots, so if users don't have scheduled snapshots (obviously we hope users have them!) or massively delete them, we can have wrong reporting over shares (quota limits in the future: 2015/* qgroups easily reaching quota limit ) Option A: add quota rescans when deleting snapshots too Option B: make it a supervisored task every x (5-10? mins) @schakrava & @phillxnet ? While testing shares usage and deleting some snapshots (no scheduled snapshots) my 2015/* was nicely going up while not expected (when deleting snaps with exclusive sizes, 2015/* being their "father" takes those orphans and seems at least 2 rescan required to come back to real values)

simon-77 · October 13, 2025, 4:20pm

Thanks @Hooverdan for referencing the github issue.

A few more remarks:

Why does rockstor have to initiate quota rescans at all?
Having a quick read at ArchWiki it seems that they don’t have to be triggered manually at all
When watching the web UI (page Pools) closely, it jumps to Enabled briefly when a scan is finished. But within a few seconds another scan is triggered and then the state is again shown as “Disabled”.
It seems to me, that the issue is in the transition from Disabled to Enabled Quotas only …
Is there any workaround to set the Rockstor Quotas setting to enabled under the hood, while enabling the quotas on OS level manually?