this post was submitted on 04 May 2024
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Just a simple question : Which file system do you recommend for Linux? Ext4...?

EDIT : Thanks to everyone who commented, I think I will try btrfs on my root partition and keep ext4 for my home directory πŸ˜ƒ

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[–] boredsquirrel -4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (4 children)

BTRFS is not more performant than EXT4.

I personally dont use any features of BTRFS manually though, as Fedora Kinoite does that for me.

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Note that ext4 is damn old and thus also not as performant as more modern ones like btrfs or bcachefs

This is not true. BTRFS has more features but ext4 is very performant. They're both similar enough that I promise you that you wouldn't notice unless you had some very specific use-case that needed to be performance tuned.

What do you think "being old" has to do with performance?

[–] boredsquirrel -1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

What do you think "being old" has to do with performance?

Being tailored to NVMEs or SATA SSDs instead of to HDDs and similar. But I am not sure about which one would be better here.

Phoronix Benchmark so we have something to look at

BTRFS seems to be better at multithreading, being outperformed by F2FS (which I forgot to mention, it is used on Android and I would call that damn stable).

Actually, F2FS seems to be a really good replacement for EXT4, being top in most tests, while having no journaling, while BTRFS in fact worked pretty badly!

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 5 points 6 months ago

Right, your claim that ext4 "isn't performant because it's old" is crap.

[–] lemmyreader@lemmy.ml 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Note that ext4 is damn old

Hmm ? Linux kernel is way older than ext4. And before ext4 there was ext3 and ext2. Linux users also have the choice of using XFS file system and for IT persons working for corporations XFS can have some advantages. Let's see, XFS was born in 1993.

more modern ones like btrfs or bcachefs

Years ago I thought that bcachecfs looked interesting but last thing I read about it this year was not very promising regarding reliability. Not sure whether it was in comments on Lemmy but here I found something from Linus himself : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcachefs#Stability

[–] jcarax@beehaw.org 4 points 6 months ago

Yeah, bcachefs is still very very young, and not ready for much of anything beyond tinkering. But I'm definitely excited to have a native filesystem that's designed with tiers in mind.

[–] Corgana@startrek.website 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

2008 is not "damn old" in terms of filesystems.

[–] jcarax@beehaw.org 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It is 16 years ago, that's pretty old in terms of technology.

It's also an evolution of ex3 and ext2, and ext if you want to consider it's very short lifetime. In fact, the lead developer stated in 2008 that it was meant as a stop gap, as it's based on old technology with some new features, and that BTRFS was the future.

[–] blackstrat@lemmy.fwgx.uk 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

And yet here we are 16 years later with btrfs only just in a position to be usable (perhaps. My experience is that I'll never use it again)

[–] jcarax@beehaw.org 2 points 6 months ago

And EXT had been developed for 16 years at that point (and XFS for 15). They didn't mature overnight, either.

Hopefully bcachefs matures more quickly, because we need a mainline replacement for ZFS.

[–] You999@sh.itjust.works 2 points 6 months ago

Exactly especially when the default file system on windows is 30 years old.

[–] You999@sh.itjust.works 1 points 6 months ago

ETX4 was released in 2006 and BTRFS was released in 2007.