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I have never really paid much attention to filesystems on Linux just installed which ever the installer is set to use, with that in mind do we need another file

I have never really paid much attention to filesystems on Linux just installed which ever the installer is set to use, with that in mind do we need another filesystem?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
danudey 3y ago
bcachefs supports a lot of features that would be useful for even home user desktop systems. For example, the filesystem supports snapshots. This would let you do something like have apt (in Ubuntu) create an automatic snapshot of the filesystem before running an upgrade, so that if the upgrade fails or causes problems you can roll it back trivially. It also supports native compression, saving users tons of disk space. It supports combining multiple devices together for redundancy, and it can checksum all of your data so that you can know if a file was corrupted without it introducing transparent failures into your system. It supports copy-on-write, so that you can make instantaneous "copies" of files or directories which take no extra space unless you change them. So yeah, there are a lot of functionalities that we can enable with newer filesystems. ext4 is pretty great all in all, but there are a lot of modern features that modern hardware and concepts enable.
5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
If you go by features, there aren't many alternatives. Unless I set up a database server, I consider checksums + snapshots + compression + reflinks to be table stakes these days. There is only one mainline filesystem that supports all of that, and it has its share of issues that are unlikely to ever be fixed, and is (probably permanently) tarnished in many users' eyes because it was pushed too early. So the question is, do we really need a second filesystem? (Yes?)
bityard 3y ago
Different file systems are optimized for different workloads and use cases. If you're just installing Linux on a laptop for medium-duty use, then you don't need anything special and can go with whatever general-purpose FS the distribution recommends, usually ext4. (Although I am partial to XFS myself.) You only need to consider more specialized filesystems if you have unique needs. For example, if you are setting up a file server, you might want a filesystem that is good at disk redundancy and data durability. Or you might need a filesystem that can handle billions of small files. Or you might have a huge database that needs random access to large amounts of flash storage. All of these are very different scenarios that require different (competing) things from the filesystems. In this case, bcachefs _seems_ to be promising many of the features of ZFS but with a better design and less overhead, potentially bringing these features to general-purpose workloads as well. (ZFS is fairly resource-intensive: in order to make full use of its features, you need a dedicated box for it, or really beef up the hardware on the application server that it will run on.)

I have never really paid much attention to filesystems on Linux just installed which ever the installer is set to use, with that in mind do we need another filesystem?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

danudey 3y ago

bcachefs supports a lot of features that would be useful for even home user desktop systems. For example, the filesystem supports snapshots. This would let you do something like have apt (in Ubuntu) create an automatic snapshot of the filesystem before running an upgrade, so that if the upgrade fails or causes problems you can roll it back trivially. It also supports native compression, saving users tons of disk space. It supports combining multiple devices together for redundancy, and it can checksum all of your data so that you can know if a file was corrupted without it introducing transparent failures into your system. It supports copy-on-write, so that you can make instantaneous "copies" of files or directories which take no extra space unless you change them. So yeah, there are a lot of functionalities that we can enable with newer filesystems. ext4 is pretty great all in all, but there are a lot of modern features that modern hardware and concepts enable.

5e92cb50239222b 3y ago

If you go by features, there aren't many alternatives. Unless I set up a database server, I consider checksums + snapshots + compression + reflinks to be table stakes these days. There is only one mainline filesystem that supports all of that, and it has its share of issues that are unlikely to ever be fixed, and is (probably permanently) tarnished in many users' eyes because it was pushed too early. So the question is, do we really need a second filesystem? (Yes?)

bityard 3y ago

Different file systems are optimized for different workloads and use cases. If you're just installing Linux on a laptop for medium-duty use, then you don't need anything special and can go with whatever general-purpose FS the distribution recommends, usually ext4. (Although I am partial to XFS myself.) You only need to consider more specialized filesystems if you have unique needs. For example, if you are setting up a file server, you might want a filesystem that is good at disk redundancy and data durability. Or you might need a filesystem that can handle billions of small files. Or you might have a huge database that needs random access to large amounts of flash storage. All of these are very different scenarios that require different (competing) things from the filesystems. In this case, bcachefs _seems_ to be promising many of the features of ZFS but with a better design and less overhead, potentially bringing these features to general-purpose workloads as well. (ZFS is fairly resource-intensive: in order to make full use of its features, you need a dedicated box for it, or really beef up the hardware on the application server that it will run on.)