Ask HN: Anyone using f2fs in real-life scenarios? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Anyone using f2fs in real-life scenarios?

5 pointssupermatou5 comments

I've test-run f2fs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F2FS) on several laptops and various devices booting from external USB/MMC devices in the past month. The subjective perception of the change in performance (from standard ext4) is evident. I was thinking very seriously about changing all my non-HDD-based devices to f2fs when I stumbled upon this:

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/atc19-jaffer.pdf

Basicaly, it says that f2f2s doesn't do as much checking for hardware errors as ext4 and tends to fail silently when there's a problem with the physical medium. This worries me and makes me want to stop using it - but the paper in question is more than a couple of years old and f2fs has continued to evolve, patches have been submitted to the Linux kernel and so on.

Anyone using f2fs care to share his/her experience with it?

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What worries me the most is corruption and data loss due to power outages.

Put it on my laptop (with ssd) for my workholic use. Heavy development,docker,K8s, javascript/node/webpack, browsing, etc.etc. etc.

10 months+ no issues (with Manjaro on /), really happy with it. The performance jump was really noticeable (subjectively).

Last week updated kernel branch from 5.4 to 5.10 (wifi card finally works on 5.10, knock,knock) and again no issues at all.

Various articles and benchmarks: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&q=F2FS

Recommending.

I've used F2FS before and ran into similar problems mentioned. My partition became unusable and fsck.f2fs didn't help. I lost the files, but thankfully had backups.

Since then, I have found that exFAT was better suited to my use case.

This was a few years ago now, I came away from the experience thinking the ideas are nice but it needs more time to mature.

Obviously this is all anecdotal, I've lost partitions to plenty of filesystems before, but the fact that little to no data recovery software existed for F2FS at the time was really the concerning factor.

> My partition became unusable and fsck.f2fs didn't help.

How long ago was that? I read that some distributions were unable to mount/repair f2fs filesystems if they were created with newer f2fs-utils (I infer that the filesystem evolved and their kernel didn't keep up with the developments - but that must have been a long time ago, as f2fs is officially supported in the kernel now, no module necessary)

> I read that some distributions were unable to mount/repair f2fs filesystems if they were created with newer f2fs-utils

That was definitely the case. The f2fs-utils on the distro I was using was woefully out of date, but I built the latest from source and still had no luck.

Obviously YMMV and I know several prominent phone manufacturers are using F2FS now.

I'm not exactly sure when it was but it was probably 3-4 years ago. My use case was a Raspberry Pi, it's possible that Raspbian support was more of a problem than anything. I didn't use it for very long before switching to exFAT, I'm fully open to the possibility that I got particularly unlucky and my issues were no fault of F2FS.

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