Comment by throwaway1194 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway1194 | Hacker News Reader

> Using Fedora on this hardware feels super snappy. File system operations are shockingly fast. Compiling software seems much faster than on macOS, though I did not benchmark this. My hunch is that the process management is a bit slower in macOS, due to the Mach / XNU underpinnings. 3D graphics performance is good too.

I'm glad that people are starting to notice this, Linux has been great for file system operations for a long time now.

I have a theory about why that is, and I think it's because of Linus Torvalds' obsession with performance, this is why git is so fast as well.

Torvalds has said multiples times that he is a performance centric person and it shows:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA&t=1335s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjIPv8a0hU8&t=3027s

I also believe that it's going to be impossible to beat Linux in the performance game as time goes on, because things like io_uring and similar optimizations are just going to make other systems pale in comparison.

I'd love to hear technical explanations of the differences in performance for the most popular Linux filesystems (ext4, XFS, BTRFS, ZFS) vs. APFS and ZFS on macOS. But differences are certainly very noticeable between the ext4 Linux VMs on my personal Mac and the native APFS filesystem for anything that touches lots of files (compiling big programs, basically any Nix commands).

I've not thought about performance specifically, but I've always thought of Linux's great filesystem support in terms of breadth, features, and activity of development as a consequence of Linux's place in the server world. People run storage at incredible scale on Linux, and then mere desktop users can take advantage of the same tech on their laptops and it works pretty well. I think that makes some sense for performance, too: people run databases where IO efficiency eventually translates to money saved every month, and then we desktop users benefit from many of those as well.

I imagine that if Apple were still targeting the server market and it were a big part of their revenue, filesystem features and performance on macOS would look more like how they do on Linux.

> I think that makes some sense for performance, too: people run databases where IO efficiency eventually translates to money saved every month, and then we desktop users benefit from many of those as well.

Indeed, that's a huge advantage of Linux, the fact that we all run the same Linux kernel and benefit from improvements coming from all directions.

Linus himself mentions this advantage here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA&t=2330

There's a nice recent benchmark here (Bcachefs vs. Btrfs vs. EXT4 vs. F2FS vs. XFS): https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-611-filesystems

Bcachefs is starting to look really good against Btrfs, no APFS or ZFS though, but still interesting nonetheless.

Single-threaded (in the kernel/control flow sense, not posix threads) nature of filesystem server in Minix v2 is presented as major point of why Linux is monolithic - by having all of I/O including FS handling in the monolithic kernel, Linus got multithreaded filesystem "for free" (sans locking, which before SMP was less of an issue too)

Interesting, I didn't know that. Thanks for sharing!

>Linux has been great for file system operations for a long time now

Doesn't that performance vary wildly between the different Linux filesystems?

> Doesn't that performance vary wildly between the different Linux filesystems?

To some degree it does, I'd say it depends a lot in your use case.

Linux is still going to feel snappy because of other optimizations though, even with a slow disk and filesystem.

The way Linux manages RAM is also important as everything is cached by default.

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