File System Wars

#1

Post by rantingdemon » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 9:06 AM UTC

File System Wars
bytearchitect.io

Re: File System Wars

#2

Post by i_am_a_peasant » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 1:55 PM UTC

Is there a reason in particular why btrfs is not part of this discussion? It's been mentioned once in passing.

Re: File System Wars

#3

Post by otterley » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 2:40 PM UTC

A solid article, but missing discussion of XFS and Btrfs. I would have enjoyed the author’s analysis of the former in particular, especially as compared to ext4.

Re: File System Wars

#4

Post by sam_lowry_ » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 3:14 PM UTC

otterley wrote: post #3

A solid article, but missing discussion of XFS and Btrfs. I would have enjoyed the author’s analysis of the former in particular, especially as compared to ext4.

Also biased towards APFS which has quite some problems, e.g. unicode normalization hell.

Re: File System Wars

#5

Post by kjs3 » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 4:43 PM UTC

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #4

otterley wrote: post #3

A solid article, but missing discussion of XFS and Btrfs. I would have enjoyed the author’s analysis of the former in particular, especially as compared to ext4.

Also biased towards APFS which has quite some problems, e.g. unicode normalization hell.

Yeah...he even alludes to it in his APFS section: "hey I talked about all those other filesystems so I can talk about what I really want to talk about...how awesome I think APFS is".

Re: File System Wars

#6

Post by mmh0000 » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 6:46 PM UTC

The author's praise of ZFS fell 3 checksums short of acceptable.

ZFS is not a filesystem. It is a lifestyle. A covenant. A snapshot of the soul. Everything else is basically a USB stick with dreams.

I will be reporting this to the [author]ities, HR, and my dad.

/s for the /s impaired.

Re: File System Wars

#7

Post by m-p-3 » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 6:49 PM UTC

otterley wrote: post #3

A solid article, but missing discussion of XFS and Btrfs. I would have enjoyed the author’s analysis of the former in particular, especially as compared to ext4.

I wouldn't mind seeing BcacheFS compared too, despite the current falling out between the main dev and Linus and its exclusion from the kernel (which will hopefully be a momentary thing).

Re: File System Wars

#8

Post by isr » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 8:34 PM UTC

DragonflyBSD's hammer filesystem (on v2 now, I think)

Re: File System Wars

#9

Post by troad » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 2:55 AM UTC

> So, if I had to compress its philosophy into one sentence, it would be this:

>> Simple, reliable, UNIX-native fundamentals — no feature bloat, just solid engineering.

This isn't the author's summary. This is AI's.

I was enjoying the article, but when a little AI shibboleth like this shows up, I just cease to trust what I'm reading.

Edit: many more AI writing give-aways later in the article. What a shame.

Re: File System Wars

#10

Post by pseudohadamard » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 3:51 PM UTC

Did anyone else giggle every time they read "FFS" in TFA?