Ted Ts’o sent out the EXT4 updates today for Linux 6.11. He explained in that pull request:
“Many cleanups and bug fixes in ext4, especially for the fast commit feature. Also some performance improvements; in particular, improving IOPS and throughput on fast devices running Async Direct I/O by up to 20% by optimizing jbd2_transaction_committed().”
Wow my favorite FS is still being developed. Nice
Mine too. I could not bring myself to adopt a new or different FS at the moment. I wonder what “fast devices” and “slow” in this context means.
Fedora people would say that BTRFS is better because it allows maintenance that EXT4 doesnt even have :)
I really like the idea of BTRFS and what it can do. For my recent system, build in end of 2023 (not a year ago) I really thought about and compared the systems, but end up using EXT4. Here some thoughts I had:
I want to use BTRFS as my main system FS, but I wasn’t sure which alternative FS to use (there are other contenders too), if I need the extra functionality, if its 100% stable for me on a non Fedora system and I also did not want to spent the time learning and experimenting with it, yet. But I will. And if other distributions I install or boot into would work well with BTRFS, if they are not on the newest Kernel yet.
I’m not quite sure why people are still worried about the stability of btrfs when it has been rock solid for years. Synology has been using it for quite a while now in their NAS systems, they surely wouldn’t if it’d mean a lot of customers were at risk of losing their data.
There are valid reasons not to be using btrfs (although I’d argue most ordinary use cases don’t have a valid reason), but stability certainly isn’t one of them, independent of the distribution used (unless it’s ancient).
Wait til your table with all the checksums gets messed up on an “older” btrfs install. Happened to me on a VM because I didn’t know copy-on-write should be disabled for large frequently partially updated files. It also slowed that VMs IO down a lot.
Like most file systems, BTRFS is great if you know the edge cases. I recently moved to ZFS on my new work system, which has been a great change in terms of in-line snapshots and the like.
If EXT4 meets your needs, that’s awesome. If you understand how to use a different FS well or are willing to learn (and risk), I would also encourage other options as well.
Note my research of BTRFS is almost a year old now. And there was still a few headlines making round of problems with BTRFS in some cases. A controlled NAS system is not the same as random user configuration of a random desktop user. And as said in my comment, I was not sure if it would be stable for my installation (when I did my research) and did not claim it to be unstable. On the other side, I know for a fact that EXT4 is stable and I did not research more or experiment to find out which one is better for me.
Current state of BTRFS: https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Status.html (note when I did my research, Linux was at Kernel v6.4, therefore BTRFS was in a worse situation than today)
If you’re interested I have a fairly thorough “I use this” post on my website (last time I updated it was in early 2023) about btrfs.
Sure! I’m interested into the “current” state or real world experience of it. Wouldn’t mind if you post it here. Although I am not sure how relevant it is 1 year later, because the filesystem is quite under development.
Here you go: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/archive/2019-11-04/experimenting-with-btrfs-in-production/
That its under development means that it’s being maintained. EXT4 is still being developed, so is xfs. And the other ones that are fairly popular, for that matter.
Thanks. But it’s important to note your experience report is based on the experience of 2019 and the slight edits aren’t changing that. That its being developed is not the same as under maintenance. EXT4 is fully developed and there are only optimizations in performance expected, if anything, while BTRFS still needs active development to improve compatibility and some other features.
I’m still curious to how to work with it and such a report is still welcome. I’ll give it a read. Edit: Hopefully my reply didn’t sound too negative. I’m interested in the process of going all of this, so the article is useful in a practical sense.
My experience is based on running that btrfs array since 2019. It’s still running in production on my server, I still use it daily, and the data I keep on it is still accessed, processed, indexed, and backed up every day. It’s not an experiment for the sake of a blog post, it’s a thing that is part of my personal infrastructure. The reason I update that post periodically is because I learn something new, or something minor has changed and the text should be updated to reflect that. If using btrfs on a busy server every day is the experience of 2019, I don’t know what to say to that.
i’m using fedora on ext4 lol, the single unavoidable problem with BTRFS is that i’d have to switch to it :P
Tumbleweed people like me would say it’s a great filesystem because it enables snapper to work effortlessly.
I dislike Fedora anyways.
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Haha okay fine if you want to XD I just made aware that such a comment is totally useless.
And it is totally useless indeed but tbh I don’t think it’s necessarily bad to make useless comments if it’s not a user asking for help.
I understand ext4 being dependable, but favorite? I’m curious what makes it your favorite.
It’s stable and well refined. Imo these are the most important things for a file system.
Sure, yeah, I would say you should only trust stable, well refined filesystems as a daily driver. Which is why I was curious what set ext4 apart from the rest for you.
Huge news 🎉 Thanks OP for sharing.
It feels like a relief after reading earlier Lemmy comments in other posts about btrfs vs ext4 and having read this Wikipedia page paragraph :
In 2008, the principal developer of the ext3 and ext4 file systems, Theodore Ts’o, stated that although ext4 has improved features, it is not a major advance, it uses old technology, and is a stop-gap. Ts’o believes that Btrfs is the better direction because “it offers improvements in scalability, reliability, and ease of management”.[29] Btrfs also has “a number of the same design ideas that reiser3/4 had”.[30] 😢
Oh no, wait a minute, I overlooked the next sentence last time 😀 :
However, ext4 has continued to gain new features such as file encryption and metadata checksums.
ext4 is better than btrfs in terms of speed right?
