Ubuntu Developers Seem to Be Pursuing ZFS Root Partition Support on the Desktop | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu Developers Seem to Be Pursuing ZFS Root Partition Support on the Desktop

phoronix.com

20 pointsrbanffy6 comments

Can anybody explain practical differences between btrfs, zfs, and xfs? I've used reiser in the past, but I understand maintenance is low these days.

Curious to know pros and cons; considering which to use. This is for three purposes: one, personal computer. Disk partitioned among 3 os. Two, storage server. This involves a hodgepodge of old disks I want to pool and use as one virtual disk. I do have an ssd in the mix, which I wish to use as a caching drive (in case writes are too slow/reads too fast for the hdds). Raid is not a huge priority, but parity (raid5?) would be nice if possible across multiple disks with very different sizes. Three, application server. These store some data, but largely run from ram (alpine linux sys mode install). Reliability is good for these.

If anyone can advise what is best, that would be appreciated.

zfs and btrfs are copy on write, have snapshots, transparent compression, subvolumes, can do raid on their own, etc. Btrfs is less mature.

For your case, zfs pool, raid0, ssd as cache disk for zfs. Xfs is a standard fs.

Thanks, this is a great summary. Very good to know.

The short answer is BTRFS, ZFS, and XFS pretty much have feature parity these days. However, I am partial to ZFS as it is by far the most mature and widely installed. I have never lost a bit of data due to data rot in any of my ZFS deployments.

Word of advice, stay away from parity bits. Mirrors are supreme. Stripe the mirrors (RAID10) for the level of performance needed.

I suppose BRTFS, ZFS, and XFS have feature parity in the sense that both are filesystems which work on Linux, but without checksumming to detect silent data corruption, to me XFS doesn't seem like it's in the same league as BTRFS and ZFS (and HAMMER(2) and Bcachefs).

I would normally go for raid 1 or 10, but the disks are of very different sizes. Range 300gb 15+-yr-old hdds to 2tb newer ones to 500gb ssds. Makes it hard to do proper mirroring, and too broke to buy new stuff.

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