"Project Springfield" Is Red Hat's Effort To Improve Linux File-Systems / Storage

[phoronix]

Phoronix: "Project Springfield" Is Red Hat's Effort To Improve Linux File-Systems / Storage

Following recent talk of Fedora potentially switching to Btrfs and Red Hat's Storage Instatiation Daemon among other Linux storage areas pursued by Red Hat, it turns out "Project Springfield" is some effort being pursued by the enterprise Linux giant for improving in this area...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Red-Hat-Project-Springfield

[theriddick]

Btrfs has some performance issues with NVMe drives when compared to EXT4 or even NTFS under windows. Until those are sorted out I'm unfortunately ignoring it.
I think it does ok for standard SSD drives however.

[oiaohm]

Btrfs has some performance issues with NVMe drives when compared to EXT4 or even NTFS under windows. Until those are sorted out I'm unfortunately ignoring it.
I think it does ok for standard SSD drives however.

https://www.percona.com/blog/2019/11/12/watch-out-for-disk-i-o-performance-issues-when-running-ext4/

Its not just Btrfs you are having cases of performance issues. NVMe controllers are doing a lot behind the OS back and its coming more and more possible to hit something that hurts badly. Its like the ZFS using people getting highly upset with SMR harddrives.

To sort NVMe issue out properly will require NVMe drive makers to agree on a standard like SMR harddrive makers have to provide more information to the OS and file system to make it simple to avoid hitting the controller in ways it does not like of course this will mean updating file system and block device systems in the OS to support it..

[theriddick]

Well you can compare Btrfs with EXT4 and see the issues. So I'm not sure if EXT4 is doing anything like what you said.

[starshipeleven]

Btrfs has some performance issues with NVMe drives when compared to EXT4 or even NTFS under windows. Until those are sorted out I'm unfortunately ignoring it.
I think it does ok for standard SSD drives however.

Is there a benchmark of this? I think I missed it if it was on Phoronix.

[polarathene]

Btrfs has some performance issues with NVMe drives when compared to EXT4 or even NTFS under windows. Until those are sorted out I'm unfortunately ignoring it.
I think it does ok for standard SSD drives however.

Source please?

That said, you don't really choose BTRFS for best performance, but for the features it offers that other filesystems like EXT4 lack. For many users an NVMe drive should provide more than enough speed for I/O, how much slower are we talking about here? Speeds above SATA 3 are adequate for many scenarios, if more speed is needed beyond that, using a different filesystem with a focus on getting the most performance can be used alongside BTRFS no?

[starshipeleven]

That said, you don't really choose BTRFS for best performance, but for the features it offers that other filesystems like EXT4 lack.

Yeah, as a general rule "Btrfs has some performance issues with any drives when compared to EXT4 or even NTFS under windows.", ZFS (the only other filesystem that has a similar feature set) is much better if you have some spare RAM to act as cache.

[oiaohm]

Well you can compare Btrfs with EXT4 and see the issues. So I'm not sure if EXT4 is doing anything like what you said.

I included link with where a Intel NVMe with a new Ext4 patch end up with performance problems. What is making these problems more fun is if you are using a different brand of NVMe you may not have problem with the change. Yes you can have one NVME that likes the way Btrfs works and hates Ext4.

The reality is like it or not you are not getting standard format information out of NVME drives that you can in fact be sure to make all the correct choices for actions from file system levels.

Yes fun of the NVMe problem you cannot really compare Btrfs with Ext4 on NVME without having a lot of brands of NVME due to the controller performance differences. You can fairly much for sata connected CMR drives and fairly good aprox for sata connected flash. Even SMR drives in harddrives give more predictable answers.

[theriddick]

Well I have a 2TB NVMe drive turning up someday soon and will run my own tests on ext4 vs btrfs, but I've seen several articles so far showing serious performance issues with NVMe and BTRFS. I could hunt them down for you, but I will just do the tests myself.

It would be nice if BTRFS was speedy for NVMe because it has a free windows kernel driver, but I doubt much has changed.

[wizard69]

The Fedora team should refocus on software correctness. I find their disk management tools to be a big disappointment every-time I go to use them. That includes install time ( buggy as hell), the graphical tools offered and the command line tools. By the way some of this stuff has been crap for several releases.

so in this limited extent of setting up new disks they need lots of work.

as for workstation support I often wonder why they default to LVM. It is a workstation , I really don’t see the point of Logical Volume Management on a workstation.

as for other file systems I still use EXT4 so I’d hope that support there continues as it is a very good general purpose file system.