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What's with all these hip filesystems and how are they different?
(lm.paradisus.day)
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this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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As with every software/product: they have different features.
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 ....
btrfs has similar goals as ZFS (more to that soon) but has been developed right inside the kernel all along, so it typically works out of the box. It has a bit of a complicated history with it's stability/reliability from which it still suffers (the history, not the stability). Many/most people run it with zero problems, some will still cite problems they had in the past, some apparently also still have problems.
bcachefs is also looming around the corner and might tackle problems differently, bringing us all the nice features with less bugs (optimism, yay). But it's an even younger FS than btrfs, so only time will tell.
ext4 is an iteration on ext3 on ext2. So it's pretty fucking stable and heavily battle tested.
Now why even care? ZFS, btrfs and bcachefs are filesystems following the COW philisophy (copy on write), meaning you might lose a bit performance but win on reliability. It also allows easily enabling snapshots, which all three bring you out of the box. So you can basically say "mark the current state of the filesystem with tag/label/whatever 'x'" and every subsequent changes (since they are copies) will not touch the old snapshots, allowing you to easily roll back a whole partition. (Of course that takes up space, but only incrementally.)
They also bring native support for different RAID levels making additional layers like mdadm unnecessary. In case of ZFS and bcachefs, you also have native encryption, making LUKS obsolete.
For typical desktop use: ext4 is totally fine. Snapshots are extremely convenient if something breaks and you can basically revert the changes back in a single command. They don't replace a backup strategy, so in the end you should have some data security measures in place anyway.
*Edit: forgot a word.
I don't think that it makes LUKS obsolete. LUKS encrypts the entire partition, but ZFS (and BTRFS too as I know) only encrypt the data and some of the metadata, the rest is kept as it is.
https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/man/v2.2/8/zfs-load-key.8.html#Encryption
Data that is not encrypted can be modified from the outside (the checksums have to be updated of course), which can mean from a virus on a dual booted OS to an intruder/thief/whatever.
If you have read recently about the logofail attack, the same could happen with modifying the technical data of a filesystem, but it may be bad enough if they just swap the names of 2 of your snapshots if they just want to cause trouble.
But otherwise this is a good summary.
BTRFS has encryption now? Yay!! I have been wrapping it inside a LUKS partition for years at this point...
They said bcachefs; I don't think BTRFS has it, at least not since I last checked.