Clarification on Btrfs Subvolumes

Question

Howdy-ha, folks.  So, I just got myself a new Western Digital Advance Format HDD for my laptop.  While I first considered cloning my current drive, I decided instead to just reinstall by backing up/restoring the pacman cache, first formatting the drive as Btrfs.  I've hit a snag, though, because despite reading through the Brtfs wiki FAQ, Use Cases and Getting Started entries word-for-word (twice, even), the Arch wiki entry on Btrfs and searching the forums I can't quite wrap my head around subvolumes.  I understand that the general idea is to do away with multiple, partially-full partitions, but I can't figure out how subvolumes are mounted and used as an analog to partitions.
I plan to use Archboot to install, and up to this point have had separate partitions for /root and /home.  In order to mimic this with Btrfs, would I simply create two subvolumes at installation time--one for root to allow for snapshots, and one for my Home folder?  Would these actually be mounted in theoretically the same way as separate partitions?  I like to tinker, and 'till now have just used clonezilla to back-up my /root partition if something went wrong, leaving /home untouched.  Sorry, but I can't figure out how this might be done, as the wiki simply explains how to create a new subvolume in a certain location and mount it manually (since it isn't a new filesystem, it doesn't need an fstab entry); and how to delete a subvolume.  It also seems that the examples used in the Btrfs wiki are for an external device, which just seems to obfuscate things.  I'd really appreciate the help of someone experienced in this or a point in the right direction, though I suppose I could also just create two separate Btrfs partitions if I can't figure it out.  Thanks.

Answer 1

So as I write this, I think I may have found a solution to the first question, and have a functional system.  I used Archboot to install this setup:
$ btrfs sub li /
ID 256 top level 5 path root
ID 257 top level 5 path home
Which, when viewed from a LiveCD, looks essentially like this:
__actual root__
|__subvbolume "root"
|__subvolume "home"
Each of these is mounted via fstab in the respective part of the file system--or at least it seems so:
#/etc/fstab: static file system information
# <file system> <dir> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
devpts /dev/pts devpts defaults 0 0
shm /dev/shm tmpfs nodev,nosuid 0 0
# DEVICE DETAILS: /dev/sda1 UUID=28a77746-673e-482c-b037-3eea590c0b14 LABEL=Boot
# DEVICE DETAILS: /dev/sda2 UUID=7caf3bbf-0d2c-4961-8693-962ebc365f20 LABEL=Arch
# DEVICE DETAILS: /dev/sda2 UUID=7caf3bbf-0d2c-4961-8693-962ebc365f20 LABEL=Arch
# DEVICE DETAILS: /dev/sda3 UUID=f6e8ba7e-0cae-429d-9a2b-e4bdf5d8be7d LABEL=Swap
LABEL=Arch / btrfs defaults,subvol=root,compress 0 1
LABEL=Arch /home btrfs defaults,subvol=home,compress 0 1
LABEL=Boot /boot ext2 defaults 0 1
LABEL=Swap swap swap defaults 0 0
This results in a seemingly ordinary filesystem when I'm logged into my desktop:
├── bin
├── boot
├── dev
├── etc
├── home
├── lib
├── lib64
├── media
├── mnt
├── opt
├── proc
├── root
├── sbin
├── srv
├── sys
├── tmp
├── usr
└── var
/home
└── anoknusa
├── ABS
├── Desktop
├── Documents
├── Downloads
├── Music
├── Pictures
├── pkglist
├── Stuff
├── Torrents
└── Videos
So, at this juncture I have what appear to be two separate snapshots mounted at separate points in order to create a single filesystem, just as I would had I mounted to separate partitions, and I'm left only wondering about the second question.
I'm still not entirely clear whether this will give me the desired effect.  Each subvolume rests at the same level of the fs tree; they're side-by-side, rather than having the "home" subvolume under the "root" subvolume.  Again, what I'm hoping for is the ability to take snapshots of "root" and "home" separately--as one would with separate partitions--so that taking a snapshot of "root" won't end up with my entire drive under it, and I can tinker without worrying about whether or not I'll have to spend two hours restoring a snapshot every few days.  I'm not sure if this would work while both snapshots are mounted, so I'm planning on testing this once my backups are done copying to my ~/  folder (I'm really no good when it comes to visualizing this sort of thing, and need to either see it in action or be told that it's gonna work by someone who's done this before). Hopefully, this works out as planned.  Any more advice from anyone would be greatly appreciated; thanks again.