4 ms·

So it IS a decent general purpose FS. ;)

• laumars 9y ago
  I think there's two incompatible arguements going on here: 1. Is ext4 a decent general purpose file system? 2. Is ext4 a decent alternative or comparable to ZFS? My answers to those questions would be: 1. It's an "acceptable" general purpose file system but it's really starting to fall behind the competition. When I see comments like how people don't need features like snapshots et al I'm reminded about just how popular Windows Shadow Copy is. Ok that is a service rather than a file system feature but it shows that there is a demand for desktops to have this feature. Checksuming is another example - it's practically free service these days as CPUs have hardware extensions for popular checksum hashes. So the argument is akin to saying "why do we need file system journaling"; sure you don't need them but you're massively grateful when you do have them and your consumer hardware throws it's inevitable hissyfit. In my opinion Linux really does need to up its game. Ext4 feels almost stuck in time when compares to the likes of XFS which is years older than ext and yet they're working on snapshotting. Then you have really forward thinking file systems like what DragonflyBSD have been working on. They understand the need for better resilience of our data on desktops due to ever expanding storage capacities and HAMMERFS looks extremely exciting as a result. So to get back to your question. Yes ext4 is acceptable for most people, but is acceptable really good enough? Maybe we should invest more time and energy into XFS? 2. Is ext4 a decent alternative or comparable to ZFS? Simply put, no.