You know, ZFS, ButterFS (btrfs…its actually “better” right?), and I’m sure more.
I think I have ext4 on my home computer I installed ubuntu on 5 years ago. How does the choice of file system play a role? Is that old hat now? Surely something like ext4 has its place.
I see a lot of talk around filesystems but Ive never found a great resource that distiguishes them at a level that assumes I dont know much. Can anyone give some insight on how file systems work and why these new filesystems, that appear to be highlights and selling points in most distros, are better than older ones?
Edit: and since we are talking about filesystems, it might be nice to describe or mention how concepts like RAID or LUKS are related.
My personal testing
Let’s agree on: it has a different performance for various use cases and hardware below. Sometimes better, sometimes worse.
Well I use it pretty much exclusively now for bare hardware. For VMs it doesn’t matter so I use ext4
Not much time, I’ll be brief with three examples that come to mind from my experience:
Great use: Large filestorage with regular changes, daily snapshots, stream snapshots offsite as backup.
Not so great use: Storage backend for qcow2 backed VMs on spinning RAID. CoW made a mess of access times.
Really not great use: Large Postgres-DB with queries that creted large ondisk temp tables.
It really depends.