My point is there are features that you don't get in EXT that are completely reasonable to use and workflows.

When someone says just use EXT4, they're just missing the fact that people may want or need those other features.

Your response to FAT is exactly my point.

ext4 aims to not lose data under the assumption that the single underlying drive is reliable. btrfs/bcachefs/ZFS assume that one/many of the perhaps dozens of underlying drives could fail entirely or start returning garbage at any time, and try to ensure that the bad drive can be kicked out and replaced without losing any data or interrupting the system. They're both aiming for stability, but stability requirements are much different at scale than a "dumb" filesystem can offer, because once you have enough drives one of them WILL fail and ext4 cannot save you in that situation.

Complaining that datacenter-grade filesystems are unreliable when using them in your home computer is like removing all but one of the engines from a 747 and then complaining that it's prone to crashing. Of course it is, because it was designed under the assumption that there would be redundancy.

This is actually a feature that enterprise SAN solutions have had for a while, being able choose your level of redundancy & performance at a file level is extremely useful for minimising downtime and not replicating ephemeral data.

Most filesystem features are not for the average user who has their data replicated in a cloud service; they're for businesses where this flexibility saves a lot of money.

and not lose files

Which is exactly why you'd want to run a CoW filesystem with redundancy.

It's not that obscure - I had a use case a while back where I had multiple rocksdb instances running on the same machine and wanted each of them to store their WAL only on SSD storage with compression and have the main tables be stored uncompressed on an HDD array with write-through SSD cache (ideally using the same set of SSDs for cost). I eventually did it, but it required partitioning the SSDs in half, using one half for a bcache (not bcachefs) in front of the HDDs and then using the other half of the SSDs to create a compressed filesystem which I then created subdirectories on and bind mounted each into the corresponding rocksdb database.

Yes, it works, but it's also ugly as sin and the SSD allocation between the cache and the WAL storage is also fixed (I'd like to use as much space as possible for caching). This would be just a few simple commands using bcachefs, and would also be completely transparent once configured (no messing around with dozens of fstab entries or bind mounts).

One of the best filesystem codebases out there. Really a top notch file system if you don't need to resize it once it's created. It is a write through, not copy on write, so some features such as snapshots are not possible using XFS. If you don't care about features found in btrfs, zfs or bcachefs, and you don't need to resize the partition after creating it, XFS is a solid and very fast choice.

Ext4 codebase is known to be very complex and some people say even scary. It just works because everybody's using it and bugs have been fixed years ago.

For me the reason was that I wanted encryption, raid1 and compression with a mainlined filesystem to my workstation. Btrfs doesn't have encryption, so you need to do it with luks to an mdadm raid, and build btrfs on top of that. Luks on mdadm raid is known to be slow, and in general not a great idea.

ZFS has raid levels, encryption and compression, but doesn't have fsck. So you better have an UPS for your workstation for electric outages. If you do not unmount a ZFS volume cleanly, there's a risk of data loss. ZFS also has a weird license, so you will never get it with mainline Linux kernel. And if you install the module separately, you're not able to update to the latest kernel before ZFS supports it.

Bcachefs has all of this. And it's supposed to be faster than ZFS and btrfs. In a few years it can really be the golden Linux filesystem recommended for everybody. I sure hope Kent gets some more help and stops picking fights with Linus before that.

if you don't need to resize it once it's created

xfs_growfs is a thing. I know nothing about xfs. Is this something I should avoid for some reason?

docs.redhat.com/en/documentati…

Bruh, you can't just submit entirely new data structures as "fixes", let alone past the merge window.

It should not be hard at all to grasp that.

Honestly I'm fine with ZFS on larger scale, but on desktop I want a filesystem that can do compression (like NTFS on windows) and snapshots.

I have actually used compression a lot, and it spared me a lot of space. No, srorage is not cheap, or else I'm awaiting your shipment.
Other than that I'm doing differential backups on windows, and from time to time it's very useful that I can grab a file to which something just happened. Snapshots cost much less storage than complete copies, which I couldn't afford, but this way I have daily diffs for a few years back, and it only costs a TB or so.

Ext4 is faster, but I love BTRFS not just because of CoW, but subvolumes as well. You could probably get something similar going with LVFS, but I prefer that to be baked in, hence why I'm waiting for bcachefs, because it'll up the ante with tighter integration, so that might translate to better performance.

Notice my use of the word might. BTRFS performance is not so great.

Btrfs doesn't have encryption, so you need to do it with luks to an mdadm raid, and build btrfs on top of that. Luks on mdadm raid is known to be slow, and in general not a great idea.

Why involve mdadm? You can use one btrfs filesystem on a pair of luks volumes with btrfs's "raid1" (or dup) profile. Both volumes can decrypt with the same key.

ZFS doesn't support tiered storage at all. Bcachefs is capable of promoting and demoting files to faster but smaller or slower but larger storage. It's not just a cache. On ZFS the only option is really multiple zpools. Like you can sort of do that with the persistent L2ARC now but TBs of L2ARC is super wasteful and your data has to fully fit the pool.

Tiered storage is great for VMs and games and other large files. Play a game, promote to NVMe for fast loadings. Done playing, it gets moved to the HDDs.

Ext4 codebase is known to be very complex and some people say even scary. It just works because everybody’s using it and bugs have been fixed years ago.

I heard that ext4s best feature was its fsck utils being extremely robust and able to recover from a lot of problems. Which does not shine a great light on the filesystem itself :/ and probably a result of the complex codebase.

FAT32 does not just work for my Linux OS.

To people who just want to browse the web, use Office applications and a few other things, ext4 just works and FAT32 really just doesn't.

I get the point you're trying to make, FAT32 also has a small file size and is missing some features, ext4 is like that to for instance Bcachefs.
But FAT32 (and exFAT and a few others) have a completely different use cases; I couldn't use FAT32 for Linux and expect it to work, I also couldn't use ext4 for my USB stick and expect it to just work as a USB stick.

Bcachefs has all of this. And it’s supposed to be faster than ZFS and btrfs. In a few years it can really be the golden Linux filesystem recommended for everybody

ngl, the number of mainline Linux filesystems I've heard this about. ext2, ext3, btrfs, reiserfs, ...

tbh I don't even know why I should care. I understand all the features you mentioned and why they would be good, but i don't have them today, and I'm fine. Any problem extant in the current filesystems is a problem I've already solved, or I wouldn't be using Linux. Maybe someday, the filesystem will make new installations 10% better, but rn I don't care.

ZFS doesn't have fsck because it already does the equivalent during import, reads and scrubs. Since it's CoW and transaction based, it can rollback to a good state after power loss. So not only does it automatically check and fix things, it's less likely to have a problem from power loss in the first place. I've used it on a home NAS for 10 years, survived many power outages without a UPS. Of course things can go terribly wrong and you end up with an unrecoverable dataset, and a UPS isn't a bad idea for any computer if you want reliability.

Totally agree about mainline kernel inclusion, just makes everything easier and ZFS will always be a weird add-on in Linux.

I know, that was an example of why it doesn't work on ZFS. That would be the closest you can get with regular ZFS, and as we both pointed out, it makes no sense, it doesn't work. The L2ARC is a cache, you can't store files in it.

The whole point of bcachefs is tiering. You can give it a 4TB NVMe, a 4TB SATA SSD and a 8 GB HDD and get almost the whole 16 TB of usable space in one big filesystem. It'll shuffle the files around for you to keep the hot data set on the fastest drive. You can pin the data to the storage medium that matches the performance needs of the workload. The roadmap claims they want to analyze usage pattern and automatically store the files on the slowest drive that doesn't bottleneck the workload. The point is, unlike regular bcache or the ZFS ARC, it's not just a cache, it's also storage space available to the user.

You wouldn't copy the game to another drive yourself directly. You'd request the filesystem to promote it to the fast drive. It's all the same filesystem, completely transparent.

Steam library

backups

media library

Wonderful.

But these are libraries. Not single files.

It is only in TLS where you have to disable compression, not in HTTP.

security.stackexchange.com/que…

Could you explain how a CRIME attack can be done to a disk?

CRIME - How to beat the BEAST successor?

With the advent of CRIME, BEAST's successor, what possible protection is available for an individual and/or system owner in order to protect themselves and their users against this new attack on TLS?

^{Information Security Stack Exchange}

Looks to be an exploit only possible because compression changes the length of the response and the data can be injected into the request and is reflected in the response. So an attacker can guess the secret byte by byte by observing a shorter response form the server.

That seems like something not feasible to do to a storage device or anything that is encrypted at rest as it requires a server actively encrypting data the attacker has given it.

We should be careful of seeing a problem in one very specific place and then trying to apply the same logic to everything broadly.

It's a filesystem that supports all of these features (and in combination):

• snapshotting
• error correction
• per-file or per-directory "transparently compress this"
• per-file of per-directory "transparently back this up"

If that is meaningless to you, that's fine, but it sure as hell looks good to me. You can just stick with ext3 - it's rock solid.

Brand new anything will not show up with amazing performance, because the primary focus is correctness and features secondary.

Premature optimisation could kill a project's maintainability; wait a few years. Even then, despite Ken's optimism I'm not certain we'll see performance beating a good non-cow filesystem; XFS and EXT4 have been eeking out performance for many years.

Not true

The only condition is that CCDL and GPL don't apply to the same file. Wifi works just fine and the source code isn't GPL yet wifi drivers are in the kernel..

opensource.stackexchange.com/q…

Are CDDL and GPL really incompatible?

Wikipedia seems to suggest that CDDL and GPL are incompatible, yet no one knows for sure why or how. Why and how are the CDDL and GPL are incompatible?

^{Open Source Stack Exchange}

I also couldn't use ext4 for my USB stick and expect it to just work as a USB stick.

Why not? It can be adapted to a smaller drive size fairly easily during filesystem creation.

Yes, but note that neither the Linux foundation nor OpenZFS are going to put themselves in legal risk on the word of a stack exchange comment, no matter who it's from. Even if their legal teams all have no issue, Oracle has a reputation for being litigious and the fact that they haven't resolved the issue once and for all despite the fact they could suggest they're keeping the possibility of litigation in their back pocket (regardless of if such a case would have merit).

Canonical has said they don't think there is an issue and put their money where their mouth was, but they are one of very few to do so.