You know, ZFS, ButterFS (btrfs…its actually “better” right?), and I’m sure more.

I think I have ext4 on my home computer I installed ubuntu on 5 years ago. How does the choice of file system play a role? Is that old hat now? Surely something like ext4 has its place.

I see a lot of talk around filesystems but Ive never found a great resource that distiguishes them at a level that assumes I dont know much. Can anyone give some insight on how file systems work and why these new filesystems, that appear to be highlights and selling points in most distros, are better than older ones?

Edit: and since we are talking about filesystems, it might be nice to describe or mention how concepts like RAID or LUKS are related.

  • aksdb@feddit.de
    27·
    7 months ago

    It likely has an edge. But I think on SSDs the advantage is negligible. Also games have the most performance critical stuff in-memory anyway so the only thing you could optimize is read performance when changing scenes.

    Here are some comparisons: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-5.14-File-Systems

    But again … practically you can likely ignore the difference for desktop usage (also gaming). The workloads where it matters are typically on servers with high throughput where latencies accumulate quickly.