An Initial Benchmark Of Bcachefs vs. Btrfs vs. EXT4 vs. F2FS vs. XFS On Linux 6.11

[phoronix]

Phoronix: An Initial Benchmark Of Bcachefs vs. Btrfs vs. EXT4 vs. F2FS vs. XFS On Linux 6.11

A number of Phoronix readers have been requesting a fresh re-test of the experimenta; Bcachefs file-system against other Linux file-systems on the newest kernel code. Your wish has been granted today with a fresh round of benchmarking across Bcachefs, Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS using the Linux 6.11-rc2 kernel. This round of testing was carried out on the newly-released Solidigm D7-PS1010 PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs that offer very speedy performance for modern Linux desktops and servers.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-611-filesystems

[JopV]

Faster than Btrfs already, nice! Glad I went with Bcachefs for my current CachyOS install, works good so far.

[ptr1337]

Thanks for the benchmark!
Is it intended, that no compression was used for btrfs?

[rob-tech]

Btrfs is really horribly slow comparing to Bcachefs considering it's been on the market so much longer. As they are both COW, I wonder why this is the case. I'm not really complaining as the root partition is plenty fast on my top of the line PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD for what I do and Bcachefs is really more of a novelty at this point, no one serious about filesystem reliability would use it for the root partition, in addition, none of the installers and major distributions officially support it.

[DumbFsck]

Michael Typo right at the beginning.
"experimenta;" probably meant "experimental"

[royce]

Great, but of limited usefulness - ZFS is the filesystem to beat, not BTRFS or ext4.

[aerospace]

Here for all the "BTRFS is better than anything else, forget EXT4 and ZFS" fanboys. Hope no one shows up.

[waxhead]

Alrighty, first of all. I am a fan of btrfs just for the record so my comment may be biased.

What this benchmark shows is first and foremost that there is a difference between COW vs regular filesystems. While interesting in itself it is still like comparing the speed of a car Vs a plane. They are fundamentally different.

Secondly, what is interesting is the speed comparison between the two COW filesystems, Bcachefs and BTRFS, and you might argue that BTRFS has room for optimizations while Bcachefs might not yet have all the safety nets/reliability in place.

What I think should have been done is to first of all drawn a red line between regular filesystems and COW based filesystems. There is expected to be a big difference.

Then it would have been interesting to inject corruptions into the COW filesystems and see how each of them handles that with comparable features turned on. And perhaps test things like power failure while writing etc. Only when the filesystems compare well on reliability does it make sense to test speed.

[avis]

I'm seriously impressed with bcachefs - one developer, versus a whole bunch of them for btrfs, and it's already faster in most workloads.

Faster than Btrfs already, nice! Glad I went with Bcachefs for my current CachyOS install, works good so far.

Good luck

Backup often if you value your data.

[ALRBP]

Of course, performance is important for lots of use cases, but let's be honest, my main concern with an FS is : "is my data safe ?".
Of course, you are never safe without a backup, but the less likely you are to need the backup, which could also fail, the better.