Last week I provided a look at the EXT4 and XFS performance from Linux 6.12 LTS through Linux 7.0 in its current development form. As mentioned in that article and as requested by many Phoronix readers, benchmarks have since wrapped up looking at how the Btrfs copy-on-write file-system performance has evolved since that late 2024 period and all major Linux kernel releases past that Long Term Support version.
Maybe this is wrong, but my understanding is BTRFS is generally slower than EXT4, and that’s okay. It’s not going for speed
Where it shines is not in its speed but in its versatility offering compression, rollback, subvol, etc
For example, for applications, you do a lot of writes/reads to Documents or load resources like for games, so use EXT4 for /home or for a dedicated /games partition
For your system, it could be broken via config tweaks or updates, so use BTRFS to have the rollback options
Also, it has self-healing RAID capabilities.
I’m still amazed from discovering filesystem-level compression.
cp --reflinkis really cool as well, even if it’s just something you expect from a CoW filesystem. Being able to near instantly duplicate a file or folder and work on its copy (with only the changes taking up space) is very useful.That’s great too!
It’s not that it’s slower than ext4 but that btrfs itself has gotten slower.
Time to
git bisectಠ_ಠDidn’t the lead contributor get hyper-psychosis or was that a different filesystem?
ai psychosis or something, but it was Kent Overstreet of Bcachefs
Btrfs is different
…and regular old murder for ReiserFS.
Not sure what it is about filesystem maintainers…
WHAT
note to self, do not develop OS’s or filesystems lmao
Ah thanks I mixed up the projects.
Ah bummer… I’m currently using XFS on my server because BTRFS’s performance is less than stellar, although I’d love to use it to have native compression
I have use cases for btrfs, xfs and zfs. Somehow ext4 feels legacy or for small systems like Raspberries or when the cloud-image provided is already ext4.
I use BTRFS for personal PCs because of the subvolume feature (since one year or so), ZFS for backup/archive when I need raid and encryption capability without hardware raid and for proxmox. XFS is for large storage servers where hardware raid is already established or very special cases when a lot of inodes are needed.
