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Installation

While these tools are still in their beta (pre-1.0 release) phase, you can already install them and try them out.

Pre-built packages

Each tagged release publishes statically-linked artifacts for x86_64, aarch64, and riscv64gc Linux musl targets on the GitLab releases page and mirrored to GitHub. Each release includes per-architecture:

  • btrfsutils_<ver>_<arch>.deb — Debian/Ubuntu package
  • btrfsutils-<ver>-1.<arch>.rpm — Fedora/RHEL/openSUSE package
  • btrfsutils-<arch>.tar.zst — relocatable tarball (extracts into btrfsutils-<arch>/{bin,README.md,LICENSE.md,CHANGELOG.md})
  • btrfs-<arch>.zst — bare zstd-compressed multicall binary

The .deb and .rpm install a single btrfs multicall binary at /usr/bin/btrfs plus mkfs.btrfs / btrfstune / btrfs-mkfs / btrfs-tune symlinks that dispatch by argv[0].

Cargo

If you have cargo installed, you can install the utilities as separate binaries:

cargo install btrfs-cli btrfs-mkfs btrfs-tune

Or install just btrfs-cli with mkfs, tune, fuse, and multicall embedded — produces a single binary that dispatches by argv[0]:

cargo install btrfs-cli --features mkfs,tune,fuse,multicall

Then symlink mkfs.btrfs, btrfstune, etc. to the installed btrfs binary.

Nix

If you use Nix with flakes enabled, you can run the tool directly without installing it:

nix run github:rustutils/btrfsutils -- filesystem show /mnt

Or install it into your profile:

nix profile install github:rustutils/btrfsutils

From source

See Building from Source for instructions on compiling btrfsutils yourself from the repository.

Requirements

btrfsutils runs on Linux. Most commands that interact with a mounted filesystem require CAP_SYS_ADMIN (i.e. root, or a process with that capability granted). The exceptions are btrfs inspect-internal dump-super and dump-tree, which only require read access to the block device or image file.