• lunarul@lemmy.world
    44·
    3 days ago

    I zoomed in to read what they’re saying on the bottom right and was disappointed.

    • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
      48·
      4 days ago

      I wish the licensing would be Linux compatible

      Overall solid but BTRFS has the advantage of being Linux native in the way it works. Right now I wouldn’t use btrfs for a critical raid system but it is great for single disks.

    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      8·
      3 days ago

      As someone who uses btrfs mostly (sometimes ext4, but I don’t really know why…), can someone explain the benefits of ZFS over the previous two I mentioned?

      • ZkhqrD5o@lemmy.world
        10·
        3 days ago

        The two biggest benefits are that it’s basically a finished implementation of btrfs (see data corruption in large pools and raid 5 and 6), as well as being able to encrypt and compress at the same time.

        Plus, and I don’t know if this is a ZFS-specific thing, being able to group disks into VDevs and not just into one big raid.

        • timbuck2themoon@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          4·
          3 days ago

          Tbf, the one thing I find nice, at least for home users, is the ability to throw JBOD and it makes it all work. Less cumbersome for newcomers. Zfs needs disks of the same size or it will only group disks into a vdev and use the smallest of the disks for capacity.

          That said, I run zfs and no btrfs anywhere. Had high hopes for bcachefs but… That’s not going particularly well.

          • ZkhqrD5o@lemmy.world
            3·
            3 days ago

            Different tools, different jobs. On my computer I also use btrfs, but on the family archive server ZFS (TrueNAS Scale). Right tool for the right job.

        • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          41·
          3 days ago

          Thanks for the info. Does ZFS allow for easy snapshotting like btrfs? Or like the stuff in the backend that allows you to do things like, say, edit a filename while the file is open?

          • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            6·
            3 days ago

            edit a filename while the file is open?

            that should work on all filesystems on linux, shouldn’t it? linux keeps file handles by inode number, not filename. this is also the reason system updates can happen while everything is running, because replacing the open files is possible too, and the processes that opened it earlier keep seeing the old version of it

          • ZkhqrD5o@lemmy.world
            4·
            3 days ago

            Snapshots like btrfs, yes. But I think every copy-on-write system can do that. But I don’t know about the rest.

          • suicidaleggroll@lemm.eeEnglish
            3·
            3 days ago

            Does ZFS allow for easy snapshotting like btrfs?

            Absolutely

            edit a filename while the file is open

            Any Linux filesystem will do that

      • Nonononoki@lemmy.world
        111·
        3 days ago

        LUKS encrypts the whole drive, native FS encryption can encrypt it partially (e.g. just the home partition). Additionally, decrypting without a keyboard is a pain or impossible (e.g. touch screen only devices).

        • Petter1@lemm.ee
          3·
          3 days ago

          PostmarkedOS was able to encrypt disk while offering on screen touch keyboard to unlock it on my pinePhone “pro”.

        • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          2·
          3 days ago

          I’m the furthest thing from an expert in linux encryption, but can you not use KDE’s “Vaults” feature to create encrypted folders/drives? I think it uses “CryFS” as the backend (according to KDE. Don’t really know enough about it).

          I’ve used them on my btrfs drive and seemed to work fine.

        • RichardTickler@lemmy.world
          1·
          3 days ago

          If the home/root partition is a physical or logical volume you most certainly can leave that decrypted while encrypting other volumes. The system could not boot if that were the case as the efi partition cannot be encrypted.

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
    252·
    4 days ago

    IDK what they mean by better ssd I/O performance, btrfs was the worst FS I tested for some heavy SSD workloads (like writing thousands of little pngs in short time, file searches, merging huge weights with some paging)…

    The features are fantastic, especially for HDDs, but it’s an inherently high overhead FS.

    ext4 was also bad. F2FS and XFS are great, and I’ve stuck with F2FS for now.

  • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
    20·
    4 days ago

    What’s the problem with btrfs really?

    It is nice but it also feels like it is perpetually unfinished. Is there some major flaw in the design?

    • swab148@lemm.ee
      25·
      4 days ago

      Mostly just the RAID5 and 6 instability, it’s fantastic otherwise. But I’m kinda excited to try out bcachefs pretty soon, as well.

    • enumerator4829@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      162·
      4 days ago

      I’ve seen ZFS in production use on pools with hundreds of TBs, clustered together into clusters of many PBs. The people running that don’t even think about BTRFS, and certainly won’t actively consider it for anything.

      • BTRFS once had data corruption bugs. ZFS also had that, but only in very specific edge cases. That case was taken very seriously, but basically, ZFS has a reputation for not fucking up your bits even close to BTRFS
      • ZFS was built and tested for use on large pools from the beginning, by Sun engineers from back when Sun was fucking amazing and not a pile of Oracle managed garbage. BTRFS still doesn’t have stable RAID5/6.
      • ZFS send/recv is amazing for remote replication of large filesystems.
      • DRAID is kind o the only sane thing to do with todays disk sizes, speeds and pool sizes.

      But those are ancillary reasons. I’ll quote the big reason from the archwiki:

      The RAID 5 and RAID 6 modes of Btrfs are fatally flawed, and should not be used for "anything but testing with throw-away data”.

      For economic reasons, you need erasure coding for bigger pools, either classic RAID5/6 or DRAID. BTRFS will either melt your data in RAID5/6 or not support DRAID at all.

    • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      mergerfs in the kernel would be cool for better performance.

      for those that don’t know, it’s a FUSE based filesystem, which is also cool, but can be slow at times.

      • WalnutLum@lemmy.ml
        1·
        3 days ago

        Weirdly enough because of the way mergerfs does writes across multiple drives, the main issue that FUSE filesystems face performance wise (namely writing a bunch of small files and their metadata) actually gets pretty well mitigated.

  • JonnyRobbie@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    3 days ago

    what’s the advantage of raid 5&6 over something like raid 4&5 - it reads essentially the same to me - a parity redundancy.

    • Hupf@feddit.org
      1·
      2 days ago

      6 is preferable over 5 because with today’s disk sizes, swapping in a new drive and resilvering it (full disk write basically in terms of amount of data) takes so long that statistically you might just encounter a second failure during that, which for raid 5 would mean complete failure of the array.

      Of course, that’s just an uptime issue, since raid is not backup.

    • InverseParallax@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      4 is bad because parity is on one drive so no matter what happens that drive is the write bottleneck. Raid5 is basically raid4 + raid0.

      5 is just fine but low safety, I run 6 always and it has basically never let me down.