I have been looking how BTRFS has been progressing. It supports CoW, snapshots, data deduplication, compression, data integrity, (…), a list of features that are unavailable in EXT4 (the current default FS in most home-oriented Linux distributions). For granted, EXT4 keeps being faster than BTRFS in most synthetic benchmarks, which makes it a better choice for servers, but this difference in speed isn’t noticeable in domestic workloads; domestic users would greatly benefit from the features offered by BTRFS. For example, Linux Mint has Timeshift, a backup solution that uses BTRFS volumes to make system snapshots. This leads me to my question: Why haven’t we switched to BTRFS as the default FS for home-oriented distributions? What features / reasons are holding us to keep using EXT4 as the default FS?
Story Published at: April 22, 2023 at 12:42PM
Story Published at: April 22, 2023 at 12:42PM