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Comment by MuffinFlavored | Hacker News Reader

> Linux filesystems seem to be evolving all the time (try to install any new distro today and check out how many filesystems you can pick from the dropdown...)

This sounds like evolution of options more than evolution of existing file systems

Is ext4 still not most popular for most end users? Curious how much ext4 has changed vs NTFS past... ~20 years (ext4 went stable 2008 apparently)

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My bet is that btrfs will replace ext4 in the nearish future. It's the default for Arch, which also comes default with filesystem snapshots before any system updates.

It's pretty nice. I think it also supports some flavor of volumes or virtual partitions, but I don't have any real use for that kind of thing.

The snapshots are really good though. Very fast and don't take up a ton of space, somehow.

Never using btrfs no matter how default it comes. Only filesystem I've had data loss with, 2 district occasions.

Would you mind noting how recent the data loss was?

Latest in the past year or so. All long after it was "stable".

Appreciate it. As someone who basically continues to use ZFS happily and didn't kick the tires because of the stability & ergonomics issues in the past, this is concerning to hear...

Looks like kicking the tires will remain somewhat in the future for me.

It's much stable after 6.4 kernel. Last year was not really stable yet. I faced too, problem is I didn't know we have to schedule a `btrfs scrub`. After kernel update and scrub, everything works smooth.

I recently had a bit of a data hiccup on my desktop laptop, where I'm using Btrfs with LVM encryption. What's weird is that I started getting these random reboots out of the blue, with no error messages to explain what was going on. I was scratching my head for a while, thinking it might be a hardware issue.

Then, in frustration, I rebooted into my Windows partition, which I rarely ever use. to see if I could back up my stuff and figure out why I wasn't having the same reboot problems in Windows.

After trying a bunch of Btrfs repair commands over a bootable usb disk I found online, I hit a wall with some errors that couldn't be fixed. So, I threw in the towel and reinstalled my system with ext4. It's been running smoothly for three weeks now with no more error headaches.

Could not find the logs of the errors anymore unfortunately to report.

Me too, also on two distinct occasions. It kept going read only on a third distinct occasion and i copied my stuff off and switched to zfs and haven't looked back. I am hoping bcachefs provides a compelling option in the next decade to switch off zfs but its a tall hill to climb

yeah, I managed to corrupt my btrfs on my laptop a few months ago (loose memory stick causing crash at bad time, apparently). I was able to recover almost everything with btrfs-restore (my latest backup was several weeks old then) but it was still not a pleasant experience...

Same, I can reliably break my NVMe RAID10 by simply pulling power

Not like, "hehe we need to sync", but "good luck repairing, enjoy probably formatting"

LVM/MD RAID, ZFS, etc all behave fine. Only BTRFS is this fragile.

Ext4 has changed their binary format twice with only forward compatibility. Mounting a new, large ext4 partition often won't work on old machines.

Source: had to patch yaboot(PowerPC Mac bootloader) to update ext4 to boot with /boot on ext4.

ext4 remains the default for a lot of distros and probably most end users, but other options are common as well. openSUSE and Fedora now default to btrfs, RHEL defaults to XFS.

XFS also has not changed much in the past 10-20 years :-).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFS lists what I would call significant improvements, in particular,

> Linux kernel 4.8 in August 2016 added a new feature, "reverse mapping". This is the foundation for a large set of planned features: snapshots, copy-on-write (COW) data, data deduplication, reflink copies, online data and metadata scrubbing, highly accurate reporting of data loss or bad sectors, and significantly improved reconstruction of damaged or corrupted filesystems. This work required changes to XFS's on-disk format.

Wow you've missed so much. It's gone from "only fast with huge files" to being one of the most performant and capable filesystems in existence

Btrfs seems to be the new standard, it might well end up being the one big thing Oracle did for Linux; it definitely evolved significantly over the last 15 years.

ext2/3/4 are the same on-disk filesystem with features added, so could also compare the timeline from the 90's. NTFS and ext2 have the same year (1993) listed on WP as intro date.

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