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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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What's with all these hip filesystems and how are they different? (lm.paradisus.day)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Let's agree on: it has a different performance for various use cases and hardware below. Sometimes better, sometimes worse.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Well I use it pretty much exclusively now for bare hardware. For VMs it doesn't matter so I use ext4

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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.