XFS / EXT4 / Btrfs / F2FS / NILFS2 Performance On Linux 5.8
Given the reignited discussions this week over Btrfs file-system performance stemming from a proposal to switch Fedora on the desktop to using Btrfs, here are some fresh benchmarks of not only Btrfs but alongside XFS, EXT4, F2FS, and for kicks NILFS2 was also tossed into the mix for these mainline file-system tests off the in-development Linux 5.8 kernel.
With the yet-to-be-approved proposal specifically to use Btrfs for desktop installations, for this testing a single NVMe solid-state drive was used for testing in jiving with conventional desktop use-cases rather than any elaborate RAID setups, etc. Each of the tested file-systems were carried out with the default mount options in an out-of-the-box manner.
Btrfs, EXT4, XFS, F2FS, and NILFS2 were tested on a Linux 5.8 snapshot as of last week. A Seagate FireCuda 520 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD was used for the benchmarking of these file-systems in different desktop use-cases. All of these Linux storage tests carried out via the Phoronix Test Suite.