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

[Michael]

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

As mentioned in the article, OpenZFS doesn't yet support Linux 6.11 (or 6.10 officially either).

[kylew77]

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.

Have you considered Xubuntu, it supports ZFS and would give you your XFCE? Also, (putting my BSD hat on) FreeBSD is not too bad if your hardware supports it and you get native ZFS giving you boot environments for updates also for the 2 years I daily drove FreeBSD 12.x it had great XFCE support. I've since jumped ship to OpenBSD when I go BSD vs FreeBSD because I don't know how secure FreeBSD is vs Linux and OpenBSD, but if I was building a file server I would go FreeBSD all the way.

[muncrief]

Have you considered Xubuntu, it supports ZFS and would give you your XFCE? Also, (putting my BSD hat on) FreeBSD is not too bad if your hardware supports it and you get native ZFS giving you boot environments for updates also for the 2 years I daily drove FreeBSD 12.x it had great XFCE support. I've since jumped ship to OpenBSD when I go BSD vs FreeBSD because I don't know how secure FreeBSD is vs Linux and OpenBSD, but if I was building a file server I would go FreeBSD all the way.

Thank you kylew77, but as I mentioned in a recent post I was wrong and silly to switch from CachyOS after mistaking a change in distribution for a change in architecture.

In fact I've upgraded my desktop to CachyOS again and am converting my BTRFS drives to ZFS even now. Which of course means reformatting and copying everything.

Not that I'm a numbskull or anything

P.S. Please don't tell anyone.

[zexelon]

Love me that XFS! Use it on pretty much every install... often on top of LVM and have never had any issues with it. Even when it has been pretty seriously abused. Layered Gluster on top of it and it has generally performed very well in production.

[Annoynomous]

I've been looking to use bcachefs on my system for a while now, but 32 bit programs are still broken AFAIK

https://github.com/koverstreet/bcachefs/issues/650

Till that's fixed, I can't switch. I'm not too concerned about data reliability personally, as everything that's irreplaceable is always on two separate external hard drives and the cloud, but I do play games, and those are not fungible pieces of software. Same problem with Wayland since I bought an Nvidia GPU ages ago when Linux games typically only supported Nvidia cards and I still remembered the bad old days of fglrx.

What I do like about bcachefs is that it can stripe data across multiple dissimilar drives, using unequal stripe sizes. And that's handy for me as I have multiple old SSDs that I use as a cache for HDDs. While a giant new single SSD would be better, I don't earn in dollars or euros and that makes me poor.

[Jumbotron]

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.

If your entire compute world revolves around XFCE then why not just dump CachyOS which is just a hobby project anyway and they’ve proven it with such a dick move and user unfriendly and just move over to Xubuntu?

You'll have your XFCE AND an industry wide supported Linux distribution underneath. Plus Canonical has made the decision to now ship the latest Linux kernel even for LTS versions. Let CachyOS go and become yet another irrelevant and soon to be abandoned Linux distribution.

[muncrief]

If your entire compute world revolves around XFCE then why not just dump CachyOS which is just a hobby project anyway and they’ve proven it with such a dick move and user unfriendly and just move over to Xubuntu?

You'll have your XFCE AND an industry wide supported Linux distribution underneath. Plus Canonical has made the decision to now ship the latest Linux kernel even for LTS versions. Let CachyOS go and become yet another irrelevant and soon to be abandoned Linux distribution.

CachyOS has integrated support for OpenZFS on every kernel.

That's all I really care about in a rolling distribution.

The optimized code is definitely a plus, but XFCE and ZFS are my often elusive goal.

And thus far CachyOS has delivered it.

For the first time, ever.

[khoek]

Great, but next time we really need a ZFS comparison.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

The optimized code is definitely a plus, but XFCE and ZFS are my often elusive goal.

I think his point was that the Ubuntu flavors all ship the ZFS kernel modules with every kernel, just like Ubuntu proper. Usually the hardest thing to work around older packages for is the DE itself. Since Xfce only updates every ~2 years, Xubuntu isn't necessarily a bad route to go for the combination of ZFS + Xfce. It also has a nice minimal desktop meta package. You could even run an Arch container in Distrobox for Arch specific and / or newer packages.

[cynic]

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.

maybe speed is not the only metric that matters?