F2FS Sees An Assortment Of File-System Improvements With Linux 4.16

[phoronix]

Phoronix: F2FS Sees An Assortment Of File-System Improvements With Linux 4.16

With each Linux kernel cycle the F2FS file-system that has been part of the mainline kernel now for five years, this "Flash-Friendly File-System" gets a bit more mature and featureful...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=F2FS-File-System-Linux-4.16

[Flaburgan]

Is there many Phoronix readers here using F2FS? What's your feedback? Do you think it is mature enough to do the switch from EXT4? What are the risk of data loss?

[kaprikawn]

I recently hosed an reinstalled my Linux system, I was looking at F2FS because my system just uses SSDs. But in the end I decided against it, I can't remember the reason exactly now, I just went with BTRFS.

Is F2FS a good fit for desktop machines with SSDs? Is it a good performer in comparison to the other filesystems? And can most of the bootloaders mount it as a root filesystem ok (I use systemd-boot)?

[Zola]

It's as safe as EXT4 that it's based upon & neither is enterprise partition type. So risk is real but minimal. Regards performance I am certain you can find enough data hire.

I am looking forward to see impact of currently merging changes.

[samdraz]

I recently hosed an reinstalled my Linux system, I was looking at F2FS because my system just uses SSDs. But in the end I decided against it, I can't remember the reason exactly now, I just went with BTRFS.

Is F2FS a good fit for desktop machines with SSDs? Is it a good performer in comparison to the other filesystems? And can most of the bootloaders mount it as a root filesystem ok (I use systemd-boot)?

last time i tried on desktop, F2Fs cant handle power outages[corruption /loss of infromation(mostly)], on evo 250 ssd, switched to btrfs

but still use it one all flash drive[need its encryption]

[tajjada]

I have found F2FS to be very unreliable with unclean shutdowns / power failures. I have gotten data loss.

That said, the last time I tried it was maybe 10 kernel versions ago, but I doubt much has changed since then.

I use btrfs, because, even though it is slower, I have *never* had any data loss with it. I use btrfs for pretty much all my storage, except my server's HDD array, which is ZFS. Some of those filesystems see *a lot* of unclean shutdowns. No problems at all.

Also, compression (especially now with zstd support), subvolumes, snapshots, reflinks, deduplication, etc. are all great features to have, which other filesystems lack.

[samdraz]

only thing, btrfs is missing ie..encryption which f2fs has

[EarthMind]

only thing, btrfs is missing ie..encryption which f2fs has

You can enable hardware encryption on a lot of SSD drives though

[starshipeleven]

And can most of the bootloaders mount it as a root filesystem ok (I use systemd-boot)?

If you use systemd-boot you have the kernel in the UEFI partition, so whatever filesystem for root is fine.

[scoobs]

I actually use F2FS on a Seagate SMR Archive 8TB drive for some media storage. I find it to be quite decent in performance with read speeds of ~170MB/s and write of ~130MB/s for larger files, which is pretty good for a cheap high capacity spinning disk I think. If you were using as it as a system drive it would be just plain awful I'd imagine. I haven't had any problems with this configuration since the 4.4 kernel but the issues were in relation to the drive and not the file system. As for data loss I have a UPS so that problem has never arisen for me. Yes I am probably crazy for using F2FS on a spinning disk