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this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2024
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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ZFS is still the de-facto standard of a reliable filesystem. It's super stable, and annoyingly strict on what you can do with it. Their Raid5 and Raid6 support are the only available software raids in those levels that are guaranteed to not eat your data. I've run a TrueNAS server with Raid6 for years now, with absolutely no issues and tens of terabytes of data.
But, these copy on write filesystems such as ZFS or btrfs are not great for all purposes. For example running a Postgres server on any CoW filesystem will require a lot of tweaking to get reasonable speeds with the database. It's doable, but it's a lot of settings to change.
About the code quality of Linux filesystems, Kent Overstreet, the author of the next new CoW filesystem bcachefs, has a good write-up of the ups and downs:
I started evaluating bcachefs in my main workstation when it arrived to the stable kernels. It can do pretty good raid-1 with encryption and compression. This combination is not really available integrated to the filesystem in anywhere else but zfs. And zfs doesn't work with all the kernels, which prevents updating to the latest and greatest. It is already a pretty usable system, and in a few years will probably take the crown as the default filesystem in mainstream distros.
Yes and that's the reason why I usually pick BTRFS for less complex things.
Yeah. I would not for example install ZFS to a laptop. It's just not great there, and it doesn't like things such as sudden power failure, and it uses kind of a lot of memory...
Meanwhile BTRFS provides me with snapshots and rollbacks that are a useful when I'm messing with the system. And subvolumes bring a lot of flexibility for containers and general management.
For sure. I would say if you run a distro like Arch, using it without cow filesystem and snapshots is not a good idea... You can even integrate snapshots with pacman and bootloader.
I've been running nixos for so long, that I don't really need snapshots. You can always boot to the previous state if needed.
If you write software and run tests against a database, I'd avoid having the docker volumes on btrfs pool. The performance is not great.