XFS Progressing On Defragmenting Free Space - Needed For Online Shrinking

[phoronix]

Phoronix: XFS Progressing On Defragmenting Free Space - Needed For Online Shrinking

As part of a New Year's Eve patch deluge, XFS developer Darrick Wong sent out patches working on free space defragmenting support, among other work for further enhancing this mature open-source file-system...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/XFS-Defragment-Free-Space

[elatllat]

s/ art / at /g

[bash2bash]

XFS was dead-on-arrival, just because it did not support shrinking...

Now someone is trying to implement shrinking? maybe too late...

[timofonic]

XFS was dead-on-arrival, just because it did not support shrinking...

Now someone is trying to implement shrinking? maybe too late...

What's better than XFS? It's not the most featured, but the most stable.

Btrfs and ZFS are in alpha state in comparison, ZFS being better in some aspects but far from perfect. The rest of alternatives are in extremely very alpha state.

[bash2bash]

btrfs is not alpha, no need to spread FUD.

btrfs is here, now and supports shrinking. It comes as the default file system for Fedora. Mature, stable and reliable.

Sure, xfs is those things as well, mature and stable and reliable... but without shrink support? ... dead on arrival.

[michaelo2]

XFS was dead-on-arrival, just because it did not support shrinking...

RHEL has been using XFS as default filesystem since RHEL7, that was released in 2014. RHEL being the most used Enterprise level Linux distribution and RHEL7, RHEL8 and RHEL9 current versions using XFS by default, are you sure that is dead? I would say millions of servers running XFS means that it's quite alive.

[CochainComplex]

XFS is quite fast on NVME

[pkese]

That ... and reflink support should make the decision between ext4 and XFS a no-brainer.
I wish XFS got compression support as well.

[timofonic]

btrfs is not alpha, no need to spread FUD.

btrfs is here, now and supports shrinking. It comes as the default file system for Fedora. Mature, stable and reliable.

Sure, xfs is those things as well, mature and stable and reliable... but without shrink support? ... dead on arrival.

Are you sure about Btrfs? I see a lot of damage control, but no proper RAID support and such is something to seriously consider.

XFS isn't so dead on arrival, still quite used in production ready systems and Red Hat (the Linux landlords) using it by default.

Will Bcachefs be the true next gen filesystem in ten years? I hope so, current situation is a mess.

[zexelon]

Like all things Linux... all the file systems are a mess in one way or another.

Btrfs is not alpha... but it cant shake its dark past... its also by no means feature complete and outside its Facebook use case (which is highly specific and NOT going to be used by the majority of Linux users...) it provides interesting but overly complicated options with questionable reliability.

Ext4 has been around since the inflationary epoch it seems. So far its probably the most stable if arcane Linux file system. Yes its old and does have a lot of legacy baggage, but its extremely reliable and more advanced features can be layered into it with setups like LVM.

XFS is also a mature and very reliable file system. Yes it does not support online shrinking... but yes that is in general an esoteric requirement. There are 100% use cases for it... just like there are 100% use cases for RAID5/6 in a volume manager (hint dont use this on Btrfs), but they are not common use cases. XFS is focuses on performance in some very common use cases and it excels there. In my personal experience I will always pick XFS over any other Linux FS these days. If you need more advanced features layer XFS over LVM, this provides a mature, stable and exceptionally reliable file system foundation. GlusterFS for example strongly recommends building their clustered file system on top of XFS. Facebooks primary data storage platform, Tectonic, is built on top of XFS (albeit modified of course for their specific use case).