- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.ml
I want to learn more about file systems from the practical point of view so I know what to expect, how to approach them and what experience positive or negative you had / have.
I found this wikipedia’s comparison but I want your hands-on views.
For now my mental list is
- NTFS - for some reason TVs on USB love these and also Windows + Linux can read and write this
- Ext4 - solid fs with journaling but Linux specific
- Btrfs - some modern fs with snapshot capability, Linux specific
- xfs - servers really like these as they are performant, Linux specific
- FAT32 - limited but recognizable everywhere
- exFAT - like FAT32 but less recognizable and less limited
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How well a file system recovers from crashes or corruption.
fall guysZFS on anything storage related. Enterprise level snapshot and replica management.
How’s it better than XFS? I heard same things about it too.
ZFS is completely different than XFS. XFS is like a better (different?) ext4. ZFS is an error-checking software raid COW filesystem that does snapshots and can have multiple replicas, both local and remote. It uses zvols and datastores. Think btrfs on steroids and with a working raid subsystem.
It’s got a weird semi-closed license because Oracle is involved but it’s never been enforced and at this point is in such widespread use in large and small enterprises that it would be impossible to enforce.
OpenZFS is under a completely FOSS license but it’s incompatible with the GPL and can’t really ever be merged into the Linux kernel. The workaroundids to provide it as source code which gets compiled as a module every time there’s a new kernel via dkms.
More controversially, Canonical ship OpenZFS pre-compiled in Ubuntu which some lawyers believe to be infringing on ZFS’ codebase.
Honestly the OpenZFS situation on Linux is probably the biggest single reason for the growing interest in btrfs and bcachefs, the former slowly becoming default on more Linux distros over time and lots of investment from SUSE and Facebook AFAIK.
ZFS where possible for maximum reliability
It also has self healing, no “partitions”, high performance, compression, smart drive redundancy without RAID holes, encryption, deduplication and an extremery intelligent cache called ARC
Holy xfs is probably not close to that?
XFS is simply a journalling filesystem.
ZFS is a COW filesystem and volume manager with compression, block management, and an adaptive read cache.
Kind of an apples-to-oranges comparison.
Technically XFS is also a CoW filesystem, but it doesn’t have the vast array of features that ZFS does like volume management, snapshots, send/recv etc. It does have reflink support which I guess is a kind of snapshot for a file.
Ext4 and ZFS.
- Ext4 for system disks because it’s default in OS installers and it works well. I typically use it on top of LVMRAID (LVM-managed mdraid) for redundancy and expansion flexibility.
- ZFS for storage because it’s got data integrity verification, trivial setup, flexible redundancy topologies, free snapshots, blazing fast replication, easy expansion, incredible flexibility in separating data and performance tuning within the same filesystem. I’d be looking into setting up ZFS on root for my next machine. Among other things that would enable trivial and blazing fast backup of the system while it’s running - as simple as
syncoid -r rpool backup-server:machine4-rpool.
I’d be looking into setting up ZFS on root for my next machine
I too was on the path of adventure once but then the kernel module hasn’t been built after the upgrade. Also btrfs offers some nice features for root especially that zfs doesn’t have.
It’s one of the reasons I use Ubuntu LTS, the ZFS module is bundled by default.
Also btrfs offers some nice features for root especially that zfs doesn’t have.
Oh? Elaborate pls.
You can boot straight into snapshot, may be useful if an update went wrong or you don’t like new kde.
You can change drives and raid configuration online. For example I bought a laptop that had windows preinstalled, so I used the second half of the disk space for linux, then I figured I don’t need windows so I formatted windows partition to btrfs, added it as a new device, moved all the data there, deleted the old linux partition and extended the new one to the whole drive, all that easy and without reboot.
Oh nice. I think that all of those are possible with ZFS too. Although I’m pretty sure that the snapshot-boot is done outside of ZFS itself. As in, there’s something else that takes the snapshots and makes them available to the bootloader. I think zsys used to do that in the experimental ZFS-on-root support that shipped in Ubuntu 20.04. I recall having a snapshot appear before every update and those snapshots were selectable from GRUB.
ext4 because its the default and works fine
Never doubted it. Do you use journaling feature on it?
Wasn’t that the entire purpose of ext4 vs ext3? As the default, I also keep journaling on for ext4 partitions. Even /boot.
ext3 had journaling, but not ext2. Also ext3 doesn’t really exist anymore as it was merged into the ext4 driver which can read the old format.
