Btrfs vs. Ext4

[King Dude]

Btrfs[en.wikipedia.org]
Ext4[en.wikipedia.org]

Which file system do you prefer and why?

[Hitsuji]

btrfs is unstable and should not be used outside of an experimental system.

[fowll]

Since this is a forum for gamers i assume Ext4.
Btrfs has a lot of awesome features, but it is not needed for a gaming OS.
Ext4 is (i think) still faster for normal usage.

[CoderMonkey]

Only use btrfs if you're going raid (it has excellent raid support). It's pretty stable but isn't mature enough to be consider ready for enterprise until then it's classified as experimental.

[UnkendTech]

Originally posted by CoderMonkey:

Only use btrfs if you're going raid (it has excellent raid support). It's pretty stable but isn't mature enough to be consider ready for enterprise until then it's classified as experimental.

btrfs is for huge drives way bigger them what 99.99% of gamer's will use

[blackout24]

ext4

Never needed btrfs's features and ext4 is faster and has been tested more.

btrfs is unstable and should not be used outside of an experimental system.

That is not true. The Jolla Sailfish OS Phone uses btrfs and openSUSE says it's good enough.

[Shark]

I don't think btrfs is faster than ext4 and the snapshot feature is not required for SteamOS, so I guess Ext4 is the obvious choice.

[UnkendTech]

Originally posted by blackout24:

ext4

Never needed btrfs's features and ext4 is faster and has been tested more.

btrfs is unstable and should not be used outside of an experimental system.

That is not true. The Jolla Sailfish OS Phone uses btrfs and openSUSE says it's good enough.

you have to remove a lot of feature's of btrfs to make it stable

[Hitsuji]

Originally posted by Doc Holliday:

Originally posted by blackout24:

ext4

Never needed btrfs's features and ext4 is faster and has been tested more.



That is not true. The Jolla Sailfish OS Phone uses btrfs and openSUSE says it's good enough.

you have to remove a lot of feature's of btrfs to make it stable

Not only that, but there's also an element of volatility to the spec. Any implementation of the current spec may not be compatible with the final spec. Leaving you with a file system that can only be ready by a specific kernel.

[King Dude]

Btrfs has SSD awareness, which results in larger write operations and faster write throughput, so I'm not sure how people are thinking that it's slower than Ext4.
(Source[btrfs.wiki.kernel.org])

Originally posted by Shark:

I don't think btrfs is faster than ext4 and the snapshot feature is not required for SteamOS, so I guess Ext4 is the obvious choice.

Incremental Backup[btrfs.wiki.kernel.org] may not be required, but it can help a lot.

[Hitsuji]

Originally posted by Killer3474:

Btrfs has SSD awareness, which results in larger write operations and faster write throughput, so I'm not sure how people are thinking that it's slower than Ext4.
(Source[btrfs.wiki.kernel.org])

Originally posted by Shark:

I don't think btrfs is faster than ext4 and the snapshot feature is not required for SteamOS, so I guess Ext4 is the obvious choice.

Incremental Backup[btrfs.wiki.kernel.org] may not be required, but it can help a lot.

There's a large number of features that can be beneficial to SteamOS or any desktop distro such as online defrag, online volume resizing, online fsck (planned), native raid, and compression.

But that still doesn't mean it should be used. Once it's stable I certainly will be jumping on board the btrfs train.

[blackout24]

Originally posted by Killer3474:

Btrfs has SSD awareness, which results in larger write operations and faster write throughput, so I'm not sure how people are thinking that it's slower than Ext4.

It's slower.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_311_filesystems&num=1

I think the ssd mount flag for btrfs just toogles some stuff that you'd normally set for ext4 aswell like discard and noatime.

[StevenRaith]

Originally posted by CoderMonkey:

Only use btrfs if you're going raid (it has excellent raid support). It's pretty stable but isn't mature enough to be consider ready for enterprise until then it's classified as experimental.

Someone better tell Oracle then....
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Btrfs-ready-for-production-in-new-Oracle-Linux-kernel-1471706.html


Although I do agree that EXT4 is a better choice for a consumer/commodity system - Oracle systems will be supported by rather highly paid expert contractors. Most other projects - less so.

Sod all wrong with EXT4 for most things, it's well understood, gives good performance etc.

There's nothing stopping someone intrepid from dropping another file system in there as far as I'm aware, though? Anyone wanna bang SteamOS on a ZFS platform and stripe it across 24 SSDs? ;)

[runequester]

I'd say EXT is the way to go. It's stood the test of time, it's very well known and there's not many surprises or changes in specification.

[UnkendTech]

Btrfs is the Wayland of file systems its only going to take them 7 years to get it done lol

[Uniquely Named]

Btrfs is very cool, but I reserve it for backup servers and NAS, where features are more important that speed. Last time I used it as my main FS was 3.9 I think, and Btrfs was perceptibly slower.

Later releases have been performance focused however, with skinny extents in 3.10 and significant performance improvements in 3.11. It may be worth revisiting.