On 4/12/25 5:27 AM, lejeczek via users wrote:
Hi guys.
might be interesting - https://www.phoronix.com/review/fedora-42- ubuntu-2504-zen5
L.
"Fedora Workstation 42 remains on the Btrfs file-system while Ubuntu 25.04 is sticking to the EXT4 file-system out-of-the-box."
Hmmmmmmam. I really like ext4. I wonder why the change?
On Sat, Apr 12, 2025 at 10:01 AM ToddAndMargo via users < users@lists.fedoraproject.org> wrote:
On 4/12/25 5:27 AM, lejeczek via users wrote:
Hi guys.
might be interesting - https://www.phoronix.com/review/fedora-42- ubuntu-2504-zen5
L.
"Fedora Workstation 42 remains on the Btrfs file-system while Ubuntu 25.04 is sticking to the EXT4 file-system out-of-the-box."
Hmmmmmmam. I really like ext4. I wonder why the change?
The dramatic decrease in the cost of storage capacity and uses cases that require massive volumes of data. See: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/what-bit-rot-and-how-can-i-detect-it-rhel
On 2025-04-12 9:00 a.m., ToddAndMargo via users wrote:
On 4/12/25 5:27 AM, lejeczek via users wrote:
Hi guys.
might be interesting - https://www.phoronix.com/review/fedora-42- ubuntu-2504-zen5
L.
"Fedora Workstation 42 remains on the Btrfs file-system while Ubuntu 25.04 is sticking to the EXT4 file-system out-of-the-box."
Hmmmmmmam. I really like ext4. I wonder why the change?
Today, you really need a COW filesystem that can easily be dynamically extended to new disks as needed, a solution to the RAID5/6 inability to recover in a reasonable amount of time on today's large disks, do not need the additional complexities of LVM disk management under the filesystem, SSD erasure tagging, parallel reads/writes, bit-rot detection and correction, etc. EXT4 cannot handle any of those problems. EXT2/3/4 were always an interim solution.
ZFS is the cadillac of filesystems, but is proprietary to Oracle. Ubuntu will underwrite the legal costs for you using ZFS on Ubuntu, but no other distro will. It is also not well suited to single-disk workstations.
BTRFS gives you 90% of ZFS capabilities, is almost as fast, works well on single-disk workstations, and is a really good next step for 99% of users. It has unfinished parts, like RAID5/6 write-hole problems just like LVM has, and no native encryption yet. Fedora has only partially moved to BTRFS, leaving the boot mechanism still on EXT2 for unknown reasons. The Suse distros have been all-in on BTRFS for a lot of years now, while Fedora only moved to it in 2021. Its been the default Fedora filesystem for 10 releases now.
Interestingly, Fedora's parent RedHat distro went with XFS instead of BTRFS for very unclear reasons. Its good too, but the learning curve for fixing things is very high, and it does not handle the normal bit-rot issues at all.
On 4/12/25 7:48 AM, John Mellor wrote:
like LVM has, and no native encryption yet. Fedora has only partially moved to BTRFS, leaving the boot mechanism still on EXT2 for unknown reasons. The Suse distros have been all-in on BTRFS for a lot of years
You can delete the `/boot` entry while installing and it will still work.
On Sat, 2025-04-12 at 10:48 -0400, John Mellor wrote:
Today, you really need a COW filesystem that can easily be dynamically extended to new disks as needed, a solution to the RAID5/6 inability to recover in a reasonable amount of time on today's large disks, do not need the additional complexities of LVM disk management under the filesystem, SSD erasure tagging, parallel reads/writes, bit-rot detection and correction, etc. EXT4 cannot handle any of those problems. EXT2/3/4 were always an interim solution. ZFS is the cadillac of filesystems, but is proprietary to Oracle. Ubuntu will underwrite the legal costs for you using ZFS on Ubuntu, but no other distro will. It is also not well suited to single-disk workstations. BTRFS gives you 90% of ZFS capabilities, is almost as fast, works well on single-disk workstations, and is a really good next step for 99% of users. It has unfinished parts, like RAID5/6 write-hole problems just like LVM has, and no native encryption yet. Fedora has only partially moved to BTRFS, leaving the boot mechanism still on EXT2 for unknown reasons. The Suse distros have been all-in on BTRFS for a lot of years now, while Fedora only moved to it in 2021. Its been the default Fedora filesystem for 10 releases now.
Interesting, I like all the reasons given for why BTRFS. I've continued to install to ext4 mainly for one reason (which for all I know isn't valid anymore). However, I seem to recall an issue with figuring out how much space was available. There were a handful of additional tools needed to query the filesystem. I just didn't have the time or patience to learn a bunch of additional tools for a specific filesystem. Is that still the case?
On 4/22/25 11:44 AM, Nathanael Noblet wrote:
Interesting, I like all the reasons given for why BTRFS. I've continued to install to ext4 mainly for one reason (which for all I know isn't valid anymore). However, I seem to recall an issue with figuring out how much space was available. There were a handful of additional tools needed to query the filesystem. I just didn't have the time or patience to learn a bunch of additional tools for a specific filesystem. Is that still the case?
"df" is good enough for almost all cases. I haven't found a case yet where it wasn't. If you want detailed and fully accurate info, you can run "btrfs filesystem show". If you keep the used space below the recommended 80%, you won't have any issues. And I've gone well over that without encountering any issues. Filling it completely is likely to cause you difficulty.
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George N. White III -
John Mellor -
lejeczek -
Nathanael Noblet -
Samuel Sieb -
ToddAndMargo