Btrfs Enjoys More Performance With Linux 6.3 - Including Some 3~10x Speedups

[S.Pam]

Ext4 still outperforms BTRFS. I'd like to see some benchmarks to see the recent speed difference with kernel 6.2 and 6.3-rc1(when it's out)

I seem to remember that ext4 isn't always faster. But it was a while back. I use reflink copies (cp --reflink) extensively and that is way faster than copying on ext4.

[TemplarGR]

if your data on ext4 get silently corrupted, your backup will contain corrupted data and you won't notice and maybe your last good copy got rotated from backups.
if your data are on btrfs you can detect corruption very soon and restore from a good copy from the backup (or, if you have a redundant configuration, they'll be automatically fixed for you).

That depends on how you do your backups.....

[aviallon]

Couldn't that be handled by Wine or Proton? The software it's running would be using Windows's file system API so there have to be intercepting those and dealing with them in their own way. They could look for other files in the directory with the same name but different casing if they don't find it on the first try.

It's actually what it does.

[brent]

With all these recent performance and reliability improvements, btrfs might actually become an a serious filesystem soon. And it only took 15 years or so.

[dreamcat4]

i am kindda split between btrfs and zfs...

on one hand, with btrfs (as your root drive / boot disk), you can setup distros and tools which does rollback / rollforwards snapshotting for system updates, and just in a really well supported and maintained way, have it on your chosen distro and working with your systems updates software or tooling. great feature

however in most (or nearly all) other respects, i am much more firmly preferring zfs over btrfs. And it's not like in the way that a person prefers pistachio ice cream over coconut flavor. No, it's in a way in which certain features or functionality i know and can make work with zfs. But just isn't seems to be possible in the land of BTRFS world. For whatever underlying technical reason(s)

And if not actually broke, then the zfs version just stands out as being in hard terms superior to the btrfs equivalent. For example: one of the features that I really believe (very strongly in) is dual boot disks in raid1. Why? Well for 0 downtime of course! You don't want to have to restore your boot disk from backup because.... well for one thing that requires another PC, and for another reason it stops you from actually using your computer, which might be essential of necessary for, oh IDK... ordering a new boot disk to replace the failed one. Or any number of unexpected reasons.

OK so i have my 2 idential media. And i have 3 options to make them mirror drives (raid1), it can be zfs, btrfs, or madm. OK, but with btrfs based solution when 1 of the 2 disks fails, and drops out. Then the filesystem automatically goes into readonly mode, (and also maybe it requires a reboot or whatever). Then i cannot keep on using my PC! I can see all my files, and it is indeed easier to recover process. Because instead of restoring from a backups, i can just buy a new media, and install the new disk in the computer. And it should then be recoverable in simple ways.

However compare this to zfs, where i can have same raid1 dual disks (mirror). And then when the time comes. When one of those disks inevitably fails. Then the system will keep on chugging along in a degraded state. I might need to setup some special system notification or alarm to alert me of that happening. To make me aware. However i can still keep on business as usually. I order my new media, the new hard drive. And for the next 2-3 days i am still chugging along in the degraded state no problem! So long as I am not so unlucky to be caught out by an unlikely drive failure of both disks at same time.

Or i might have a replacement disk already to hand (more likely, thinking ahead). OK then! so what's the downtime? Well probably literally zero, if it's sata 2.5". Because I can hotplug those disks without even requiring a system reboot. And that is about as good as it can be. However lets say i do need to reboot, then I can still keep on chugging along while the new disk is being sync'd up. No problem!

Now a lot of people use madm for dual boot disks. However it's more hassles to setup. And madm needs to be used in combination anyhow with either zfs or btrfs. So it seems kindda silly to then have the same general feature capability on both btrfs and zfs. Since I need them for other purpose.

There are also other considerations around the specific features, like somebody here mentioned earlier in this thread. How zfs is better suited for proton game drive. And all that other stuff. I won't bother getting into because it's too long post now.

But just to recap - those are the 2 main features where neither side wins: the boot snapshots (system updates roll forwards / rollback) vs the dual mirror boot disks support.

I suppose maybe if i can do good boot snapshots on zfs (as good as btrfs) then that would become a draw on that point. Instead of such a clear win for btrfs. But (clearly) btrfs has better general and out of box support for that feature amongst popular distros, etc. So it's not like a general 'win', it would just be a personal "i can hack this now, and do for my own personal needs", rather than "this is what other people can generally do, see, you should do that". No no. Others need a good out of box experience. That is being well supported.

[timofonic]

With all these recent performance and reliability improvements, btrfs might actually become an a serious filesystem soon. And it only took 15 years or so.

That was sais before, it needs to be seriously checked and see adoption for certain important server-grade distros first.

Is raid5/raid6 reliable now? Any plans for a raidz-like feature?

[fong38]

But games should already have quite compressed assets and most likely are not sharing assets across other games so IMHO both should be quite useless on the deck, but that is a guess of mine and not a stated fact so would be interested to see real numbers here.

Output of compsize pointed to the sd card on my Deck (compress-force=zstd:15):

Processed 143972 files, 2353000 regular extents (3084188 refs), 77993 inline.
Type Perc Disk Usage Uncompressed Referenced
TOTAL 86% 437G 505G 514G
none 100% 287G 287G 290G
zlib 39% 120M 302M 310M
zstd 68% 149G 217G 224G
prealloc 100% 3.8M 3.8M 872K​

Don't have the exact numbers for deduplication but I do remember it being around another 15-20GB of saved storage (with duperemove -b16k). Source games tend to deduplicate well in particular

[pkese]

Should this be taken as a sign they actually intend to get raid5/6 to a production ready state?

The "big" RAID5/6 patchset is in the works, now at revision 5, most of problems have been ironed out by now and is likely to hit mainstream sometime this year.

https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-btrfs/msg132522.html

And the patchset is not very big either - about 1000 lines of code (relative to 150,000 for the whole filesystem).

[Berniyh]

OK so i have my 2 idential media. And i have 3 options to make them mirror drives (raid1), it can be zfs, btrfs, or madm. OK, but with btrfs based solution when 1 of the 2 disks fails, and drops out. Then the filesystem automatically goes into readonly mode, (and also maybe it requires a reboot or whatever). Then i cannot keep on using my PC! I can see all my files, and it is indeed easier to recover process. Because instead of restoring from a backups, i can just buy a new media, and install the new disk in the computer. And it should then be recoverable in simple ways.

Yeah, that's something they should really fix. Although in contrast to you I wouldn't really want to actively use the system anymore.
The problem I rather see is that you can maneuver yourself into the situation where you can't easily repair the filesystem anymore, if you did mount it rw.

[Mitch]

1. I don't think N#1 priority in Linux is supporting windows games on wine.
2. If that would be the case XFS would be default.
3. Ext4 is old shit. Btrfs is new that never delivered, hopefully the new disk format will change that.

I meant for steam deck. Apologies for not being clear