An Exciting Btrfs Update With Encoded I/O, Fsync Performance Improvements

[skeevy420]

Every time BTRFS is mentioned, someone from ZFS arena appears claiming its better. The openZFS driver for windows hasn't received a update for 3yrs btw.

I still sometimes boot into windows to do special windows only tasks (I don't want to); so winbtrfs works pretty well with the exception of a crash bug in specific cases which is being investigated/fixed atm.

ZFS does sound like a better fit for server/workstation use where someone is doing fancy raid and partitioning stuff. For general desktop user, btrfs is just better imo.

8 months. That's when the last commit was.

You can use ZFS on Windows VIA WSL2. Granted, you can use ANY Linux file system like that on Windows. It can be damn handy to open Linux directories in Windows Explorer.

Personally, I'd do that, using the Linux driver in a VM, over using the currently available ZFS or BTRFS Windows drivers (no reason other than just me being overly paranoid and cautious).

[reza]

I'm a relative newcomer to ZFS (generally preferring more mature filesystems like ext4 or XFS) so am still finding my way, but on the systems I'm currently running ZFS (all two of them...) I use ext4 for /root and /home, ZFS with RAID-Z1 on three SATA SSDs for "fast" data, RAID-Z1 or Z2 across either 4 or 6 high capacity HDDs for "slow" data. It's been well behaved enough that I will probably expand ZFS to a few other systems as time permits, and get more adventurous with what I do. It was incredible easy to set up and so far has coped with the one time I managed to run out of RAM (on an 1.5TB system... oops...) gracefully (read: I didn't lose any data).

Thanks for your reply. Do you happen to dual-boot your Linux with other OSes (say Windows, MacOS, etc.) My last reason for sticking with ext4 on my data partition/disk, is it can be shared by all my OSes and recognized in a read/write access mode. Now, I know that BTRFS also has driver for other OSes. but not ZFS, eh? What do people do in this regard?

[reza]

As you can see I alternate between speedy LZ4 and Jesus Christ Why ZSTD-19. Everything 19 is stuff that will only ever be written the one time so I give it the one time overkill pass to compress as much as possible. All the LZ4 stuff is read/write data. Both open LZ4 and ZSTD open files extremely fast so I consider them to be the best choices for read/write and write once data.

Thank you very much. It was very beneficial for me. So I guess you are okay with not having access to the 4TB HDDs under Windows? I haven't booted in Windows in a long time either, but I'm still not comfortable with the thought that, if I go with ZFS, my data drive is going to be Linux-exclusive and wouldn't be available in other OSes. Your thoughts?

P.S. I looove ZFS though.

[skeevy420]

Thank you very much. It was very beneficial for me. So I guess you are okay with not having access to the 4TB HDDs under Windows? I haven't booted in Windows in a long time either, but I'm still not comfortable with the thought that, if I go with ZFS, my data drive is going to be Linux-exclusive and wouldn't be available in other OSes. Your thoughts?

P.S. I looove ZFS though.

I suspect that you're about to love me

Why? Because I'm perfectly okay having access to my ZFS HDDs on Windows in Windows Explorer.

In fact, we can access any Linux FS on Windows with WSL2. Because of WSL2 we don't have to worry about our data drive format when we're dual booting with Windows anymore. It's great

See This and This and This. Those will have all the information you'll need to get yourself setup with OpenZFS and any other Native Linux file system on Windows 10 and 11.

[Developer12]

There is also a windows port of OpenZFS, though I don't know if it's 100% stable yet. The wonders of being a very cross-OS filesystem.

[Paradigm Shifter]

I suspect that you're about to love me

Why? Because I'm perfectly okay having access to my ZFS HDDs on Windows in Windows Explorer.

In fact, we can access any Linux FS on Windows with WSL2. Because of WSL2 we don't have to worry about our data drive format when we're dual booting with Windows anymore. It's great

See This and This and This. Those will have all the information you'll need to get yourself setup with OpenZFS and any other Native Linux file system on Windows 10 and 11.

You keep providing information that needs way more than just one like.

[dfyt]

For general desktop user, btrfs is just better imo.

And yet after my last BTRFS corruptions issues only a month or so ago I have MOVED over ALL my desktops to ZFS from BTRFS for root too. Things XFS, EXT4, ZFS have that BTRFS doesn't? Consistency in performance (4x-10x slower between distros) and reliability. The day XFS gets compression and data checksumming I'll move off zfs for desktops. I'm tired of having filesystem corruption making my btrfs snapshots useless and requiring full drive formats to fix.

Unfortunately I have frequent power cuts (ups dies and eventually batteries don't hold) - BTRFS just doesn't survive - not to mention deduplication apps are very buggy, ZFS builtin and 0 issues. I have only had good results from power cuts with XFS and ZFS and I have 5 desktops in the house that used to have issues with BTRFS and power cuts ranging from Pop to Arch based. I only moved to BTRFS for all, around August last year from XFS (no issues with XFS just wanted to ride the btrfs hype).

Each year I try btrfs (4 and counting) for now I'll leave BTRFS to those with time and reliable electricity (Facebook etc).

[dfyt]

In fact, we can access any Linux FS on Windows with WSL2. Because of WSL2 we don't have to worry about our data drive format when we're dual booting with Windows anymore. It's great

But doesn't using WSL2 mean that you are running on top of NTFS anyways? Do you have native and direct disk access? Been months since I tried Windows.

[skeevy420]

But doesn't using WSL2 mean that you are running on top of NTFS anyways? Do you have native and direct disk access? Been months since I tried Windows.

The WSL2 ways are native, direct. Well, as "native" as a VM can be, but it's direct and native from within the VM. It's the Windows equivalent of adding a physical disk to a QEMU setup instead of using a disk image.

You can do WSL2 on top of NTFS, but it accepts and mounts Linux disks no problem. That's what's so great about it and why I almost went back to Windows. Then Microsoft decided to release this abomination called Windows 11. Eww. No.

[kdemello1980]

How exactly is ZFS "next-gen" compared to btrfs, or was it just generic fanboy commentary?

In this regard. Same 8 disks. raid-z1 for ZFS and the experimental btrfs RAID5.

btrfs:
diskmark_btrfs_file.png

ZFS:
zfs_20220401.png

This is a windows 10 install on a zvol in the ZFS case and a raw file, with COW disabled, on btrfs (COW absolutely kills VM performance.

LVM on MD RAID5 is in line with btrfs, performance-wise.