this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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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 rutrum@lm.paradisus.day to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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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[–] Fizz@lemmy.nz 5 points 11 months ago (6 children)

So ext4 is the best for desktop gaming performance?

[–] aksdb@feddit.de 27 points 11 months ago

It likely has an edge. But I think on SSDs the advantage is negligible. Also games have the most performance critical stuff in-memory anyway so the only thing you could optimize is read performance when changing scenes.

Here are some comparisons: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-5.14-File-Systems

But again ... practically you can likely ignore the difference for desktop usage (also gaming). The workloads where it matters are typically on servers with high throughput where latencies accumulate quickly.

[–] skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 11 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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[–] flashgnash@lemm.ee 10 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Having tried NTFS, ext4 and btrfs, the difference is not noticeable (though NTFS is buggy on Linux)

Btrfs I believe has compression built in so is good for large libraries but realistically ext4 is the easiest and simplest way to do so I just use that nowadays

[–] Cwilliams@beehaw.org 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Well that's because any support for it is unofficial. NTFS is made for Windows

[–] MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

And proprietary and an old piece of garbage.

[–] Cwilliams@beehaw.org 6 points 11 months ago

I didn't want to sound to harsh, but yea

[–] Flaky@iusearchlinux.fyi 3 points 11 months ago

I had a pretty bad experience with the Paragon NTFS3 drivers a couple years ago. Basically the kernel hung, maybe from this, maybe not, but it ended up with filesystem corruption on my hard drives.

Thankfully, Windows was able to fix it but until recently I relied on NTFS-3G. Paragon's NTFS3 driver seems to be faring a lot better nowadays.

[–] aberrate_junior_beatnik@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I'd be surprised to find out there was one filesystem that consistently did better than others in gaming performance. ext4 is a fine choice, though.

[–] lurch@sh.itjust.works 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

does tmpfs count?

[–] noddy@beehaw.org 3 points 11 months ago

I remember reading somewhere that btrfs has good performance for gaming because of deduplication. I'm using btrfs, haven't benchmarked it or anything, but it seems to work fine.

[–] Auli@lemmy.ca 3 points 11 months ago

Going to be they or XFS. There was a benchmark of the different filesystems I heard about never found it though. It was recent and included bcachefs