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.

  • Atemu
    1·
    1 year ago

    ZFS cache will mark itself as such

    It will absolutely not. ZFS ARC is accounted as “used” memory. See https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/10255 for more info.

    IIRC ZFS hooks the kswapd to free ARC in order to relieve memory pressure but it’s still a tacked-on mechanism, not the regular kernel routine.