this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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As with every software/product: they have different features.
ZFS is not really hip. It's pretty old. But also pretty solid. Unfortunately it's licensed in a way that is maybe incompatible with the GPL, so no one wants to take the risk of trying to get it into Linux. So in the Linux world it is always a third-party-addon. In the BSD or Solaris world though ....
btrfs has similar goals as ZFS (more to that soon) but has been developed right inside the kernel all along, so it typically works out of the box. It has a bit of a complicated history with it's stability/reliability from which it still suffers (the history, not the stability). Many/most people run it with zero problems, some will still cite problems they had in the past, some apparently also still have problems.
bcachefs is also looming around the corner and might tackle problems differently, bringing us all the nice features with less bugs (optimism, yay). But it's an even younger FS than btrfs, so only time will tell.
ext4 is an iteration on ext3 on ext2. So it's pretty fucking stable and heavily battle tested.
Now why even care? ZFS, btrfs and bcachefs are filesystems following the COW philisophy (copy on write), meaning you might lose a bit performance but win on reliability. It also allows easily enabling snapshots, which all three bring you out of the box. So you can basically say "mark the current state of the filesystem with tag/label/whatever 'x'" and every subsequent changes (since they are copies) will not touch the old snapshots, allowing you to easily roll back a whole partition. (Of course that takes up space, but only incrementally.)
They also bring native support for different RAID levels making additional layers like mdadm unnecessary. In case of ZFS and bcachefs, you also have native encryption, making LUKS obsolete.
For typical desktop use: ext4 is totally fine. Snapshots are extremely convenient if something breaks and you can basically revert the changes back in a single command. They don't replace a backup strategy, so in the end you should have some data security measures in place anyway.
*Edit: forgot a word.
So ext4 is the best for desktop gaming performance?
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.
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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
Well that's because any support for it is unofficial. NTFS is made for Windows
And proprietary and an old piece of garbage.
I didn't want to sound to harsh, but yea
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.
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.
does tmpfs count?
No.
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.
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