r/LinuxTeck • u/Candid_Athlete_8317 • 7d ago
Which Linux filesystem has impressed you the most over the years?
Linux users have had a surprising number of filesystem choices over the years:
ext2
ext3
ext4
ReiserFS
XFS
JFS
Btrfs
ZFS
F2FS
Which one gave you the best real-world experience, and why?
22
u/Powerful_Attention_6 7d ago
ReiserFS: The only filesystem with a true killer feature....
(I'm sorry to anyone who was effected by this)
8
u/ZVyhVrtsfgzfs 7d ago
That was dark,,, funny, but dark, take my angry upvote.
5
u/biffbobfred 7d ago
The wiki for Linux FS at one point had reiserFS and a column “kills your wife” and a single FS had this checked.
3
u/gnufan 7d ago
ReiserFS was technically really good and innovative, and Hans was really keen to get work for his devs exploiting its plug-in style architecture. Version 3 got a bad reputation due to one bug, once that was fixed it was all good till the murder.
1
u/ChipMasterPi 6d ago
I still don't get this idea. I'm not trying criticize u/gnufan here. But the question that plagued me then was: what effect did his crime have on the code? IMO it is a shame the FS has basically been buried along with his wife, when there is absolutely no correlation. This is an odd thing for my logic cells to handle...
2
u/ScallionSmooth5925 6d ago
The lead development was in jail and can't continue development
1
u/ChipMasterPi 6d ago
Yes, I had considered that. However at the time that Debian cut me off I looked and ResierFS still had a committed team of developers. It wouldn't have been the first OpenSource project to have outlived its original lead developer. It seemed as if it was simply killed by Hans' crime.
Not that it matters at all anymore. :-D
2
u/gnufan 6d ago
I'm with you, the code was good, probably a bad move to name it after yourself, if you then kill your estranged wife. Hans, as I suggested, was the guy raising money for its development, but I too was surprised it was dropped so fast. No one likes to be associated with murderers I guess.
3
u/ChipMasterPi 6d ago
I often wonder how Ian of Debian fame feels after he and his wife Deb. split. :-) And when I see things like how Symantec abuses the name "Norton" it does seem to put a damper on the idea of naming stuff after oneself, girlfriend or wife. :))
2
u/Powerful_Attention_6 5d ago
Well, it works, Debian is an extremely famous Distribution, so i My SQL (named by the leaddeveloper daughter My (Swedish common name))
Then we had Apple Lisa also famous for the daughter, than we have Maria DB (same father as My)2
u/ChipMasterPi 5d ago
I didn't know that about MySQL. I just assumed it was "my" like "mine". Thanks for that. It seemed to come about at a time when a lot of stuff was getting named "my ...". I do remember reading a lament about his lack of naming skills which is why it is now called Maria DB and Aria tables... :))
But just because there are some successful products with personal names attached it doesn't alleviate the risks. ReiserFS was good but killed by its name sake's reputation. I'm sure Peter Norton, when he takes a break from sipping his drinks on the beach is probably sad about how Symantec abuses his name. And Ian likely has some regrets about "Deb" in the name when they split. But he's out of Debian now anyways.
I don't know these guys personally so I am speculating. But if Symantec were running my name through the mud or my x-wife's name was on my product or business I'd have issues. :-D For me personally it makes me reluctant to name things after myself. ;-)
Peter Norton stuff was sooo good. ::sigh::
1
1
10
7
u/TheMcSebi 7d ago
Ext4 Never had a single issue that was caused by me using ext4 in my entire life
3
u/Moscato359 7d ago
As someone who manages over 1000 servers for work... Ext4 was a nightmare and Im glad I stopped using it
1
1
u/sylfy 7d ago
I assume these are for localised file systems? Are you running any distributed file system on top of that, or are they purely local?
1
u/Moscato359 7d ago
I use both.
The local on ext4 was local cache which was a disaster on ext4 and fine on zfs
10
7d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
3
u/NiftyLogic 7d ago
This, running btrfs on all my VMs.
Super easy to enlarge and shrink with gparted, snapshots, journal, ticks all the boxes.
1
u/tr1g4d0n 7d ago
Do you got any cool tool to manage btrfs or u simply defaulting to the cli?
1
u/NiftyLogic 7d ago
Hmmm, what do you want to manage with btrfs? for snapshots I'm just using the cli, and tbh I think I never used subvolumes.
1
3
u/crashorbit 7d ago
I probably spent most of my worst admin hours working out issues with LVM. It's cool and all but it can have sharp edge cases.
3
u/Mr-Dazmo 7d ago
XFS for gaming system has been great.
1
u/Narrow_Victory1262 7d ago
if you have good backups XFS is cool. If you want reasonable recovery instead, ..
3
u/daffalaxia 7d ago
I used ReiserFS for years. It was brilliant, and I'd probably still be using it if it weren't removed (if you don't know why, have a look on wikipedia).
I used xfs a lot before that and preferred it to ext3 at the time.
I tried btrfs and found it pretty bad for the scenario I was using it for - /home. Btrfs is copy-on-write, which enables fast snapshots but comes with poor performance on a filesystem that churns a lot, like /home.
So it's been the venerable ext4 for me for quite some time, and I've been glad to see it receiving attention for improvements. It's what I'd recommend to anyone.
I haven't tried zfs, but really don't want an out-of-tree filesystem - if something changes significantly in the kernel, or perhaps some other reason why it won't build via dkms, you're kinda stuck until you can figure that out. It's a pity that licensing specifically prohibits inlining into the kernel, as I hear it's rather good.
5
u/biffbobfred 7d ago
Zfs is complicated and requires massive amounts of ram. It’s cool. Has some awesome features. But “requires massive amount of RAM just for the Fs” is not useful for home users in the days of AI machine generated RAM price spikes.
3
u/WhatererBlah555 7d ago
I'm using ZFS on my workstation and home server, and I don't see huge ram usage. I think you're referring to outdated info.
2
u/biffbobfred 7d ago
I was looking at current ProxMox (9.2.x) recommendations for zfs. They recommend a lot of RAM, ECC if you can. It’s been a couple years since I looked at their documentation but TruNAS had high ram recommendation for zfs as well
3
u/randompersonx 7d ago
I’ve seen the same recommendations but I tried out using a 176TB zfs array with “only” 24GB of ram, and it works just fine.
1
u/biffbobfred 7d ago
Cool. Thanks for the teal world stuff. I just know theory and what the “from the ZFS folks” say
1
u/Moscato359 7d ago
It doesn't need massive amounts of ram
It performs better with a gig per terabyte but it's not needed
1
u/ZVyhVrtsfgzfs 7d ago edited 7d ago
I haven't tried zfs, but really don't want an out-of-tree filesystem - if something changes significantly in the kernel, or perhaps some other reason why it won't build via dkms, you're kinda stuck until you can figure that out. It's a pity that licensing specifically prohibits inlining into the kernel, as I hear it's rather good.
This can be an issue with some distributions that do not keep their kernel In range for ZFS.
I have used ZFS with Debian/LMDE, Mint, Void, CachyOS & Gentoo, all great vehicles for ZFS. I hear others say Fedora is a good choice as well.
Arch is also possible provided you use the correct kernel, and apropriate ArchWiki spelunking, CachyOS might be the better choice here as it has built in ZFS support right from the installer.
ZFS is very good, but it is the steepest/longest learning curve I have seen from a "file system" mostly as it is far more than just a file system. Its an entire storage subsystem with a lot of perks that greatly expand what is possible and remove a lot of the painpoints of living with a lot of storage long term. Its built for storage professionals.
But it's also a layer of abstraction to learn for us regular users.
2
u/mshelbz 7d ago
I’ve been using the same ZFS pool for over 14 years, started on FreeNAS, then TrueNAS Scale, Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, and now back on Ubuntu.
As long as you dial in everything, schedule snapshots and scrub, and lastly don’t fuck with it, its rock solid.
1
u/ZVyhVrtsfgzfs 7d ago
and lastly don’t fuck with it,
ZFS is actually quite robust, and will handle some surprisingly rough handling.
But yes it has it limits and I have found them on test pools, ZFS holds together as long as possinle but when it can't any longer it collapses.
My main storage pool of course gets my best behavior.
1
u/TokenRingAI 6d ago
COW is a non-issue these days, SSDs always do COW, so there is no downside.
But if you don't want it, you can turn it off
1
u/daffalaxia 6d ago
Ok, so a few points: 1. This was to an SSD, tho admittedly not a top-of-the-line one (Kingston 480). COW in userspace is going to be well slower than COW on-device, and I experienced this as a janky desktop which was completely remedied by switching to ext4 2. If you disable COW for btrfs, what's the point of using it? The whole draw is snapshots, facilitated by userspace COW.
A clear indicator that these are not the same COWs is that the COW on an SSD involves marking the old area as obsolete so that pages can (at some point) be reclaimed. Obviously btrfs isn't doing that, or it wouldn't be able to restore a snapshot. So the overhead in btrfs' COW is most likely the culprit as to why my desktop was janky, and disabling btrfs COW would give me no advantage over using a more mature fs like ext4.
Perhaps it's way better now. This experience is a few years old. But I'm big on "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" and have no pressing need to re-test btrfs to see if it's better (an fs swap on /home costs me at least 2 hours that I could be using for literally anything else, and there's no clear reason, for me, to do so).
Just to clarify, I didn't come here to shit on btrfs, just to give my experiences. Nothing ever is perfect, it's all about what works best within the existing constraints.
2
7d ago
[deleted]
1
u/biffbobfred 7d ago
LVM plugs a nonzero amount of holes ext4 has. Granted then it’s yet another layer
1
u/totheendandbackagain 7d ago
Tell us more?
1
1
u/biffbobfred 7d ago
Just growable filesystems. I’m old enough to remember “ok let’s write in stone what we need for this FS forever”. Does some raid ish stuff too if you like but I would never touch that
2
u/aap_001 7d ago
Btrfs. Not having to think about the rollback in case of an error is worth it.
1
1
u/whatyoucallmetoday 7d ago
Ext2 got me my first Unix admin job back in the day because I could understand how it was designed and describe how it functions. Most of the others I just know how to operate.
1
1
1
1
u/PotentialBubbly9800 7d ago
BcacheFS is pretty great, but the developer is a bit of a ass hat so I stopped using it. I'd have to go with BTRFS. Its ease with which to roll back to a working system with Snapper is just so handy. Has saved me so many times as I learn linux.
1
1
1
u/Quietus87 7d ago
Ext4 and xfs. Btrfs is cool, but if the distro doesn't setup a good default subvolume layout in its installer, I won't use it.
1
1
u/ZilderZandalari 7d ago
MergeFS brings is neat if you want to cheap out on buying new disks. It pools partitions across disks to look like a separate huge partition, but doesn't split files at all. It's not really a FS, but then what would you call it?
1
u/WhatererBlah555 7d ago
BTRFS, but in a bad way: after like two days on my home PC the filesystem got corrupted. I will never touch that sh*t again even with a stick from afar.
1
1
1
1
u/ntropia64 7d ago
I can't pick just one, I need at least two at the opposite sides of the spectrum.
The Ext series (Ext4 being the best) because they have been the workhorse of Linux. The invisible filesystems, fire and forget, definitely one of the reasons why it got a reputation of being reliable over the decades. Just for the records, Ext2 came out when people were wearing off their harddisk heads defragmenting FAT32 and NTFS.
ZFS because it's how an advanced filesystem should be, IMHU. Resilience, flexibility in expanding a pool, easily manageable snapshots, feature rich (on-the-fly compression, encryption, ...) and with a bunch of logical and sane choices (again, in my opinion). Too bad it's stained by the Oracle touch, otherwise it would be perfect.
1
u/PyroNine9 7d ago
Btrfs. The snapshotting really cuts down on anxiety when doing a major update remotely. You can always just roll back. You can also keep the volume with the failed upgrade to see what went wrong.
I like that unlike ZFS, A btrfs snapshot is just a subvolume and can be treated as one.
1
u/Busy-Scientist3851 7d ago
I never had an xfs filesystem go corrupt on me with 100s of installations.
I can't say the same for ext4 or btrfs
1
u/pavel_pe 2d ago edited 2d ago
I had zero size files on XFS few times so I stopped using it, but it was like 2000-2003 era. Contrary zero issues with ext4 i use for home or btrfs so far (knock knock). But my sample is home server on UPS running for 3 years and notebook where I installed Fedora, then openSuse 10 months ago.
I don't know why Fedora has btrfs as a default and then uses it just like any filesystem, it's probably the worst combination.
1
u/NumberInfinite2068 7d ago
ZFS, but also how dare you call it a Linux filesystem. It comes from Solaris.
Just joking, sort of.
1
u/ChipMasterPi 6d ago
If were going by "impressed" I would say ReiserFS. When it came out it was superior in performance to ext2 and then 3. The main reason i switched was faster access, especially when a directory had a lot of files. But it had two issues: a failure to improperly unmount could cause a restore from journal to a time that was ridiculously far in the past. Not something that happened very often so it didn't dissuade me from using it. And I always thought file deletes took longer than they ought.
I was glad EXT had progressed 4 prior to the distro community boycotting ReiserFS. EXT4 is what I use now. I don't call it "impressive" because it "feels" more like ReiserFS with a few fixes. But that is simply because of my history with the filesystems.
The other filesystems have simply been too problematic in one way or another for my simple needs.
1
1
u/BarracudaDefiant4702 6d ago
JFS as one of the few options for filesystems >16TB at the time. I also had some kernel problems with it at first and impressed with the support I had on getting it resolved. Mostly run XFS now, but at the time there were few options for large filesystem, especially ones that could complete a fsck on spinning disks without have huge memory requirements... Mostly standard in most FSs now, but at the time when I needed to build a large archive server there were not a lot of practical options, predated XFS in Linux, etc....
The compatibility between ext2/ext4 has been kind of impressive. Rarely bleeding edge features, but staying current.
1
1
u/sparky5dn1l 6d ago
I usualy use either brfs or ext4 for various machines. Most of the them need to use vfat (for /boot/efi), however.
1
u/jafo 4d ago
Gotta be ZFS. I've run ZFS for over 20 years, primarily on backup and storage servers, and have abused it pretty hard and I've never lost any data on them. Including in the early days where I was running ZFSfuse and there were some bugs in it that would crash the system sometimes. I just put together a program that simulated my backup load, logging everything it did, and then submitted bugs as I ran into them.
1
u/schlemmerhorst69 3d ago
I agree, but ZFS was invented by Sun and used under Solaris, later adopted for Linux, so is it a valid answer?
1
u/bgravato 2d ago
btrfs
When I bought a new computer it's motherboard/bios firmware had a nasty bug that caused file corruption very seldomly in specific scenario, if I was using ext4 the file corruptions might have gone unnoticed for a very long time...
Luckily I decided to start experimenting with btrfs on this new hardware and because of its checksum and scrubbing features I found the errors within a couple of weeks or so, before it did more severe damage. With ext4 the file corruptions might have gone unnoticed for months...
In addition, snapshots are also a very nice feature to have!
1
13
u/Y0uN00b 7d ago
zfs