[CentOS] compare zfs xfs and jfs o

Sun Aug 5 18:51:46 UTC 2012
Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at karan.org>

On 08/04/2012 08:32 PM, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> I would not call it a rant but a food for thought.

agreed!

> ZFS was distributed to the public after it turned 4.
> ZFS is now in public use since more than 7 years.

but ZFS has not had a stable release in Linux as yet, making it still be
negative in years. The codebase is likely to take a lot longer to get
into a stable status than btrfs.

> What is the age of BTRFS?

My personal experience with btrfs is from the 2.8.2x tree, at which
point btrfs struggled to notify on disk-full situation. Making it quite
academic as to what the maturity state of the system was! Admittedly,
things have moved on and at this time btrfs has an exponentially higher
contributor and adopter base on Linux than Zfs does.

btw, I dont totally agree that btrfs and zfs are feature identical, so
there will always been scope for one over the other in terms of how it
fits the problem domain a user might have.

> Also the OP did not ask for CentOS, but for a filesystem comparison.

This is the CentOS Linux list :) I think its safe to assume answers here
should be directed towards that.

> So be careful with BTRFS until it was in wide use for at least 4 years.

So, I'm all for mature and tested systems - always. But given the
problem domain, I think its wrong to generalise to that level. Lots of
people will use technology on the cutting edge, and lots more people
will adopt for feature matching with app domains. I, for one, am
grateful to these people for picking up the stuff in its early days and
working to find and then even fix issues as they come up.

> ZFS is the best I know for filesystems >= 2 TB and in case you need flexible 
> snapshots. ZFS has just one single problem, it is slow in case you ask it to 
> verify a stable FS state, UFS is much faster here, but this ZFS "problem" is 
> true for all filesystems on Linux because of the implementation of the Linux 
> buffer cache.

the other problem with zfs is its large RAM requirements - and extremely
poor 32bit support.

> There are few fs use cases where COW is not the best.

agreed.

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Karanbir Singh
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