What's with all these hip filesystems and how are they different?

rutrum@lm.paradisus.day to Linux@lemmy.ml – 226 points –

You know, ZFS, ButterFS (btrfs...its actually "better" right?), and I'm sure more.

I think I have ext4 on my home computer I installed ubuntu on 5 years ago. How does the choice of file system play a role? Is that old hat now? Surely something like ext4 has its place.

I see a lot of talk around filesystems but Ive never found a great resource that distiguishes them at a level that assumes I dont know much. Can anyone give some insight on how file systems work and why these new filesystems, that appear to be highlights and selling points in most distros, are better than older ones?

Edit: and since we are talking about filesystems, it might be nice to describe or mention how concepts like RAID or LUKS are related.

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In case of ZFS and bcachefs, you also have native encryption, making LUKS obsolete.

I don't think that it makes LUKS obsolete. LUKS encrypts the entire partition, but ZFS (and BTRFS too as I know) only encrypt the data and some of the metadata, the rest is kept as it is.

https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/man/v2.2/8/zfs-load-key.8.html#Encryption

Data that is not encrypted can be modified from the outside (the checksums have to be updated of course), which can mean from a virus on a dual booted OS to an intruder/thief/whatever.
If you have read recently about the logofail attack, the same could happen with modifying the technical data of a filesystem, but it may be bad enough if they just swap the names of 2 of your snapshots if they just want to cause trouble.

But otherwise this is a good summary.

BTRFS has encryption now? Yay!! I have been wrapping it inside a LUKS partition for years at this point...

They said bcachefs; I don't think BTRFS has it, at least not since I last checked.