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

[rb777]

It would be interesting to see ZFS too. Ubuntu desktop now supports it.

[ReaperX7]

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

OpenZFS Git works with 6.10 and 6.11 kernels on Arch via the AUR package.

Yeah ZFS is the FS to beat and still bcachefs has it's shortfalls, such as the inability to update the pool to new versions and still requires too much setup. I can still pop my updated USB installation media in the PC, update the pool and reboot back in to Arch and I'm still good to go. ZFS still is also easier to set compression and other options with.

They're getting close to a GPL ZFS, but until you get 100% parity with abilities and features, you can have 99.9% and still be second place and still be the loser against OpenZFS.

Btrfs was is beta for years so don't expect bcachefs to be considered "stable and reliable" for years. TBH, they'd be better off getting GPL to finally cave and make an amendment to CDDL and allow OpenZFS to finally be brought in. I mean honestly Oracle didn't sue FreeBSD for adding OpenZFS, so they'd probably never sue Linux either. TBH they probably could care less.

[SuperIce97]

Btrfs duplicates metadata by default, while Bcachefs does not. I'm curious what kind of impact this has on the write benchmarks. I imagine it shouldn't impact read performance unless the checksum in the metadata doesn't match the data, in which case it would need to check the second copy in case the metadata got corrupted.

[ptr1337]

Unfortunately CachyOS recently dropped GNOME, and since I use XFCE which is highly dependent on GNOME I had to revert my desktop system to Arch and convert my ZFS disks to BTRFS.

And wow, BTRFS is not only palpably slower, but when copying terabytes of data to my BTRFS disks my system would actually freeze for around 15 seconds every few minutes. And this is without any fancy features like compression.

This was quite disturbing, and now I really don't know what to do. I also have a media server with 48 TB of disks, which are about 70% full, and I'm really worried about how BTRFS will perform with such a massive amount of data. I wish the CachyOS devs would let its users know for certain if dropping GNOME is going to affect XFCE, which I expect it will, but so far I haven't received a clear answer.

So I'm in a holding pattern waiting to find out before reverting my media server to Arch, as it will take an extraordinary amount of work and time. All I need is a reasonably fast filesystem with data integrity verification, and the ability to use XFCE. But CachyOS really dropped a bomb on its users, and are going all in on KDE and Wayland for some reason. And while some people like Windows type DEs like KDE and GNOME, I will never abandon the elegant simplicity and efficiency of XFCE.

Why you are sharing over and over again that "CachyOS dropped Gnome"?
I really do not understand this statement. The only thing, which has been dropped is the Gnome ISO and the theme for gnome (which was basically just a Blue Nord GTK Theme on Gnome). Anything else is like it was before, and nothing has been changed.

Could you maybe elaborate, how you get on this info?

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Unfortunately CachyOS recently dropped GNOME, and since I use XFCE which is highly dependent on GNOME I had to revert my desktop system to Arch and convert my ZFS disks to BTRFS.

And wow, BTRFS is not only palpably slower, but when copying terabytes of data to my BTRFS disks my system would actually freeze for around 15 seconds every few minutes. And this is without any fancy features like compression.

This was quite disturbing, and now I really don't know what to do. I also have a media server with 48 TB of disks, which are about 70% full, and I'm really worried about how BTRFS will perform with such a massive amount of data. I wish the CachyOS devs would let its users know for certain if dropping GNOME is going to affect XFCE, which I expect it will, but so far I haven't received a clear answer.

So I'm in a holding pattern waiting to find out before reverting my media server to Arch, as it will take an extraordinary amount of work and time. All I need is a reasonably fast filesystem with data integrity verification, and the ability to use XFCE. But CachyOS really dropped a bomb on its users, and are going all in on KDE and Wayland for some reason. And while some people like Windows type DEs like KDE and GNOME, I will never abandon the elegant simplicity and efficiency of XFCE.

Possibly an unwelcome suggestion, but while there are tons of awesome things about Arch and several Arch derivatives, it isn't really meant to be a server OS, even for non-critical home servers. If you want ZFS for a home server, you might want to look at solutions that are specifically intended for that role and also include ZFS out of the box.

• TrueNAS Scale
• Proxmox
• Ubuntu (server)

I get wanting to use the same distro / tooling for a ton of different use cases and I'm the same way, but that's easier with some distros than others (e.g. running Debian stable on a server but Debian testing or unstable on a desktop / laptop).

[muncrief]

Why you are sharing over and over again that "CachyOS dropped Gnome"?
I really do not understand this statement. The only thing, which has been dropped is the Gnome ISO and the theme for gnome (which was basically just a Blue Nord GTK Theme on Gnome). Anything else is like it was before, and nothing has been changed.

Could you maybe elaborate, how you get on this info?

I noticed that SMART was no longer working with gnome-disks last week and when I asked about it on the CachyOS forums another user pointed me to the following link and said that it may be the problem - https://news.itsfoss.com/cachyos-mar...he%20community

So I panicked and thought the change was affecting XFCE, but now I see it was a misunderstanding and I really jumped the gun in reverting to Arch and converting my disks to BTRFS. I apologize for my error, and am switching my desktop back to CachyOS and ZFS and will become a Patreon supporter again.

In retrospect it was a truly idiotic thing for me to do without having all the facts, and I wish I could say it was the first time, but it's not

In fact after making a boneheaded mistake on my first job as a hardware/firmware engineer my manager most eloquently and angrily stated - "How can you be so brilliant and stupid at the same time?"

And unfortunately, despite my best efforts, at times I still make airhead mistakes and have to look back in wonder at how I could have been so incredibly dumb. At least in the old days I could say there wasn't any internet to quickly look things up, but now I don't even have that excuse

[ptr1337]

I noticed that SMART was no longer working with gnome-disks last week and when I asked about it on the CachyOS forums another user pointed me to the following link and said that it may be the problem - https://news.itsfoss.com/cachyos-mar...he%20community

So I panicked and thought the change was affecting XFCE, but now I see it was a misunderstanding and I really jumped the gun in reverting to Arch and converting my disks to BTRFS. I apologize for my error, and am switching my desktop back to CachyOS and ZFS and will become a Patreon supporter again.

In retrospect it was a truly idiotic thing for me to do without having all the facts, and I wish I could say it was the first time, but it's not

In fact after making a boneheaded mistake on my first job as a hardware/firmware engineer my manager most eloquently and angrily stated - "How can you be so brilliant and stupid at the same time?"

And unfortunately, despite my best efforts, at times I still make airhead mistakes and have to look back in wonder at how I could have been so incredibly dumb. At least in the old days I could say there wasn't any internet to quickly look things up, but now I don't even have that excuse

Gnome Disks disks, is a Gnome Package. CachyOS does not touch any changes for this.
Yes, we have dropped the Gnome ISO, but this has not anything to do with the Online Installation. Gnome stay as it is, at the online Installation. Just the "Installation ISO" uses KDE as default, to have less maintainance.

All fine Just wanted to correct to.

[Panix]

EXT4 is performing well. I will keep on using that.

What do you use? Is it okay to use EXT4 for Fedora and cachyOS?

That was an awful showing by btrfs. IT was slowest or performed the worst (practically) on every test. Yet, it's the default for a number of distros.

[waxhead]

Coping hard?

Btrfs is 15 years old, while bcachefs has been field tested for less than a year. If anything, it's the latter that has room for optimizations and I'm pretty sure it's gonna get faster still.

I've never seen NTFS or ext4 corrupt in my entire life (since mid 90s), yet no FS is safe from hardware failure. So backups are essential no matter what.

My point that you seem to have missed is that maybe bcachefs needs workarounds and code changes that will slow down the filesystem as bugs are discovered and race conditions are found. I hope not, but that may happen. It is a rather fresh filesystem so lots of unknowns are possible.

I am also not surprised that you have never seen ext4 or NTFS corruption since those filesystems do not detect corruption for data. You might have had lots of silent corruptions in your files that you have never seen or noticed. Just in case you did not think about that possibility. You might be surprised if you checksum your files periodically (seriously, try it!!)

Other than that I agree wholeheartedly with you. No filesystem is bullet proof (not even btrfs or zfs) so backups are essential.

[uid313]

It would be interesting to see a file system benchmark include NTFS on Windows 11, APFS on macOS, HAMMER2 on DragonFly BSD, and UFS on FreeBSD.