3mo ago

Man I miss those classy RedHat ads from the sixties

117 comments

ZFS: 🙂
- I wish the licensing would be Linux compatible
  Overall solid but BTRFS has the advantage of being Linux native in the way it works. Right now I wouldn't use btrfs for a critical raid system but it is great for single disks.
  
  Isn’t OpenZFS compatible though?
  
  But we have OpenZFS, which is under CDDL (=LGPL). So it's fine.
  Edit: I was wrong, see comment below.
- As someone who uses btrfs mostly (sometimes ext4, but I don't really know why...), can someone explain the benefits of ZFS over the previous two I mentioned?
  
  The two biggest benefits are that it's basically a finished implementation of btrfs (see data corruption in large pools and raid 5 and 6), as well as being able to encrypt and compress at the same time.
  Plus, and I don't know if this is a ZFS-specific thing, being able to group disks into VDevs and not just into one big raid.
  
  ZFS is more than just a filesystem, it's a fully-integrated disk management system which replaces mdadm, LVM, LUKS, nfsd, rsync, as well as the filesystem. It's great for NAS boxes and file servers, since you can give it a big pile o' disks, and it slices and dices, and offers simple commands to create whatever volumes you need.
- This is the way

I zoomed in to read what they're saying on the bottom right and was disappointed.
- What do you think they should be saying?
  
  She: Btrfs snaps like a pro!
  Him: Like a file system should!

That surgeon general's warning sent me into a giggle fit.

Hot format. Invest invest INVEST

IDK what they mean by better ssd I/O performance, btrfs was the worst FS I tested for some heavy SSD workloads (like writing thousands of little pngs in short time, file searches, merging huge weights with some paging)…
The features are fantastic, especially for HDDs, but it’s an inherently high overhead FS.
ext4 was also bad. F2FS and XFS are great, and I've stuck with F2FS for now.
- idk man I just wanted to make a funny meme I've never run benchmarks myself and I just use btrfs for the features
  
  Oh cool! Share the funny meme when it's done.
  (just pulling your leg. ^^)
  
  Yeah I meant no harm :P
- Really? I've found that btrfs is generally more performant than XFS
  
  Yeah, it’s like night and day. btrfs and ext4 clog up and stall on the PNG workload, it’s why I switched in the first place.
  This is on a PCIe ssd though. On an HDD or maybe a big SATA drive, features probably win out over the overhead.

What's the problem with btrfs really?
It is nice but it also feels like it is perpetually unfinished. Is there some major flaw in the design?
- Mostly just the RAID5 and 6 instability, it's fantastic otherwise. But I'm kinda excited to try out bcachefs pretty soon, as well.
  
  Me too. (And when the author gets a chill pill)
  
  So one should use ext4 for RAID 5&6?
  
  Isn't bcachefs in danger of being removed from the kernel?
- I’ve seen ZFS in production use on pools with hundreds of TBs, clustered together into clusters of many PBs. The people running that don’t even think about BTRFS, and certainly won’t actively consider it for anything.
  BTRFS once had data corruption bugs. ZFS also had that, but only in very specific edge cases. That case was taken very seriously, but basically, ZFS has a reputation for not fucking up your bits even close to BTRFS
  ZFS was built and tested for use on large pools from the beginning, by Sun engineers from back when Sun was fucking amazing and not a pile of Oracle managed garbage. BTRFS still doesn’t have stable RAID5/6.
  ZFS send/recv is amazing for remote replication of large filesystems.
  DRAID is kind o the only sane thing to do with todays disk sizes, speeds and pool sizes.
  But those are ancillary reasons. I’ll quote the big reason from the archwiki:
  The RAID 5 and RAID 6 modes of Btrfs are fatally flawed, and should not be used for "anything but testing with throw-away data”.
  For economic reasons, you need erasure coding for bigger pools, either classic RAID5/6 or DRAID. BTRFS will either melt your data in RAID5/6 or not support DRAID at all.
- The main one is how it handles corruption. It has actively been designed to do the exact opposite of what a sane filesystem should do and maximises downtime.
  
  It shouldn't be that hard to patch it so that it works around failures. I'm not sure why that doesn't seem to be a config setting.

Still no built-in encryption support :(
- What are the benefits of built-in encryption versus LUKS ?
  
  LUKS encrypts the whole drive, native FS encryption can encrypt it partially (e.g. just the home partition). Additionally, decrypting without a keyboard is a pain or impossible (e.g. touch screen only devices).
- https://news.opensuse.org/2025/02/20/setup-fde-on-opensuse/

your data will have the same fate as that baby
- Made smaller for easy delivery?
- It was gonna be twins but they deduplicated, so conveniently the one simply holds a reference to the existence of the other one.
  
  🤯

I can't be the only one that reads BTFRS as butt farts
- If you were, not anymore. That's what I'm calling it from now on.
- Am I old if I read BTRFS as butterface?
- And here I thought it was "butt first".
- Maybe not butt farts, but butter for sure.
- I can't help but try to phonetically call it "BUTTERFURSS". O.o
- I think your subconscious switched up the letters to induce the funny
  
  Or the dyslexia

The CoW nature of Btrfs means it's often slower than ext4 for common tasks, right? It also means more writes to your SSDs.
I've stuck to ext4 so far, as someone who doesn't really have a need for snapshotting.
Edit: I'm not an expert on file systems in the least, so do chime in if these assumptions are incorrect.
- Meh, ssds are basically cow by nature anyway, you have to erase large blocks, you can't just rewrite into them.
  
  But if the file system needs extra writes anyway for CoW, and the SSD needs its own CoW, then wouldn't that end up being exponential writes? Or is there some mechanism which mitigates that?

Friends don’t let friends use filesystem level deduplication.
- Why?
  
  It’s just too slow and memory consuming. Leave it for backup solutions like Borg.

I wish we could just get one good open, unified filesystem that all OS's support. It sucks that if I want a usb drive to function on both Android and Linux, I have to format it to FAT. That pos fs can't even store files over 4 gigs.
I normally prefer copyleft licenses, but this is one case something more permissive seems appropriate.
- Honest question: I thought this limitation was the purpose of exFAT? 🤔
  I don't use it much myself though so I'm not sure.
  
  exFAT seems very fragile and likes to corrupt often, MacOS especially likes to break it
  
  Maybe? All I know is the other day I used my Debian pc (gnome) to format a usb drive as fat, thinking that'd be the most compatible and hassle free fs for storing and transferring files. Then I got an error that I couldn't store Champions of Norrath on it because it couldn't store files over 4 gigs. So for now I just am using ext4.
- practically begging for someone to post the competing standards xkcd
- Personally, I enjoy having multiple options and being able to choose what meets my needs best.
  
  FAT(ty)

What BTRFS stand for? (Wrong answers only)
- Bro The RAID Fuckin Sucks
  
  Wow an acronym nested in another acronym.
- Breast, Thighs, and Ribs For Supper
- Buttered Toast and Recursive Folder Shenanigans
- Better FS
  
  Unfortunately, no. FOSS devs are notoriously known for picking bad names for their projects and BTRFS is no exception. The official name is Butter FS, likely because it’s supposed to make your experience smooth, yet anyone who tried to use its RAID5/6 implementations can tell you that it’s furthest from the truth.
- Broken Terrible wRetched Fucking Shit
- BlueTooth Rams Family Sister

Notice the hard drive is a Southern Numeric branded Xavier Blue.
- It's a random 3d model I found on the internet haha. The "Southern Numeric" got a chuckle out of me as well XD

Wtf lol

Wow! Didn’t know they had this back then. Very cool.

How about lvmvdo
https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/lvmvdo.7.html
- Oh thanks for this.

Who needs RAID when you have mergerfs
- mergerfs in the kernel would be cool for better performance.
  for those that don't know, it's a FUSE based filesystem, which is also cool, but can be slow at times.
  
  Weirdly enough because of the way mergerfs does writes across multiple drives, the main issue that FUSE filesystems face performance wise (namely writing a bunch of small files and their metadata) actually gets pretty well mitigated.

what's the advantage of raid 5&6 over something like raid 4&5 - it reads essentially the same to me - a parity redundancy.
- 4 is bad because parity is on one drive so no matter what happens that drive is the write bottleneck. Raid5 is basically raid4 + raid0.
  5 is just fine but low safety, I run 6 always and it has basically never let me down.
- 6 is preferable over 5 because with today's disk sizes, swapping in a new drive and resilvering it (full disk write basically in terms of amount of data) takes so long that statistically you might just encounter a second failure during that, which for raid 5 would mean complete failure of the array.
  Of course, that's just an uptime issue, since raid is not backup.

As someone who uses openSUSE, this is great I love it.

117 comments