this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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Potentialy dumb question here, is there any benefit to using btrfs on a non system disk? I'm fairly ignorant on file systems, asfaik btrfs largest benefit is snapshotting, not sure of anyothers.

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[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I usually just stick to the standard file system to any OS.

So for Linux that would be ext4.

For external drives i use either FAT32 (the ol' reliable) or exFAT (the fastest for dealing with large files when you set the max allocation unit size AKA 32MB).

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

So for Linux that would be ext4.

It's worth noting that the default file system varies by distro - there is no 'Linux' default. For example, RHEL et al use XFS as the default.

[–] Sir_Simon_Spamalot 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I thought RHEL is going with ext4 or btrfs these days. I know Fedora is on btrfs, while Debian & Ubuntu is on ext4.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

RHEL is going hard on XFS, they've even completely removed BTRFS support from their kernel - they don't have any in-house development competency in it after all. It's somewhat understandable in that regard, since otherwise they wouldn't necessarily be able to offer filesystem-level support to their paying customers.

Though it is a little bit amusing, seeing as Fedora - the RHEL upstream - uses BTRFS as their default filesystem.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If there is one thing one can learn from the Linux community at large is how to agree on absolutely nothing and still be friends (mostly, that is. As long as Linus isn't involved. Then the gloves are off. Who dared to put rust in the kernel?!)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Lennart Poettering has entered the chat

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Is Red Hat the next canonical?

[–] talos_the_true_god 7 points 1 year ago

Fedora’s gone the btrfs route, RHEL has all but given up on btrfs, pushing xfs

[–] uis 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

make menuconfig says:

Ext2 is a standard Linux file system for hard disks.

And this for ext4:

This is the next generation of the ext3 filesystem.

But defaly indeed is ext4.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

ext4 is literally just the latest version of the ext filesystem (AKA it has the most funcionality).

If you REALLY wanted MAX speed, you could make your system drive ext2, but you would lose some metadata, drive info & management tools.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

It says it is "a" standard file system - not "the" standard. Very different things.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well, both SUSE and Fedora use BTRFS as the default file system, RHEL uses XFS, etc.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

openSUSE uses BTRFS as the default filesystem for / and if you have any additional disks (for example a separate home) it uses XFS by default. Unless that's changed since the last time I installed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

When I worked through some AutoYaST setups for Leap 15.5 the default disk setup did BTRFS across the line, though that could definitely differ from doing the install interactively.