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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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 …
Also ZFS has tendency to have HIGH (really HIGH) hardware/CPU/memory requirements.
It was originally designed for massive storage servers (“zettabyte” file system) rather than personal laptops and desktops. It was before the current convergence trend too, so allocating all of the system resources to the file system was considered very beneficial if it could improve performance.
I haven’t meant it as the criticism of ZFS. It is just so, and perhaps there were good reasons for it. Now (especially with the convergence trend) it hurts.
