what filesystem do you use? and why?

mv · Watchman Joined: 20 Apr 2005 Posts: 6749

Ext4 for main partitions.
Ext4 w/o journal for external harddisks and /boot.
fat/vfat for exchange purposes.
squashfs+overlayfs/aufs/unionfs-fuse for portage tree, /var/db, /usr/src, /usr/share/{games,texmf-dist}, /usr/lib/libreoffice, joint E*_STORE_DIR

Perfect Gentleman · Veteran Joined: 18 May 2014 Posts: 1252

F2FS, XFS v5

dmpogo · Advocate Joined: 02 Sep 2004 Posts: 3269 Location: Canada

ext2 (perhaps ext3 somewhere), reiserfs(3), XFS depending on partition, type of drive, and purpose. Not with super deep thoughts. Used JFS onces, switched it to reiserfs(3) just for some uniformity

risq · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 03 Dec 2004 Posts: 75

Ext4 for all my systems, wheter its SSD or harddrive. rock solid fs since years

ftz · n00b Joined: 12 Sep 2014 Posts: 3

ext2 for /boot and the highest numbered and hopefilly matured ext for everything else. Always worked well so far.

vaxbrat · l33t Joined: 05 Oct 2005 Posts: 731 Location: DC Burbs

ycUygB1 · Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2014 8:07 am Post subject:

My experience with btrfs was this:

Converting from ext4 to btrfs worked fine.

Converting to RAID1 failed with an error that the file system was full, even though it was not. This is a known problem. The workaround http://marc.merlins.org/perso/btrfs/post_2014-05-04_Fixing-Btrfs-Filesystem-Full-Problems.html did not work for me.

Converting back to single-disk, or to RAID-0 failed as well with the same error. This left my system in a mishmash of single-disk, RAID-0, and RAID-1 with no way to get out of this state.

Attempts to revert to ext4 using the built-in reversion feature failed summarily as well.

Attempts to resize the btrfs partitions so that I could move the data to an ext4 partition failed as well.

I eventually had to wipe all my drives, format them as ext4, and restore the whole system from backup.

I also noticed bizarre data corruption in my files. For instance, my /etc/apache2/httpd.conf file mysteriously developed errors that I had to edit back to the way it was supposed to be.

This was true with all versions of btrfs-progs, up to 9999.

Btrfs reminded me of a disease. Not too hard to get, doesn't work as advertised, it might kill your system, and there is no way to get rid of it.

vaxbrat · l33t Joined: 05 Oct 2005 Posts: 731 Location: DC Burbs

Fair enough then. I always copied from ext4 or whatever to a fresh btrfs volume set and never tried to convert in-place. I never had any problems as a result other than one or two that I later found were due to corrupted memory sticks.

mv · Watchman Joined: 20 Apr 2005 Posts: 6749

Spanik · l33t Joined: 12 Dec 2003 Posts: 963 Location: Belgium

desktop: ext2 for /boot, reiserfs for the rest of the system partitions, XFS on the raid 5 that contains my data files and JFS on a spare disk that is used as a sort of first line backup/scratchpad

laptop: ext2 for /boot and XFS for all the rest.

fat32 for a couple of external usb disks
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Expert in non-working solutions

GFCCAE6xF · Apprentice Joined: 06 Aug 2012 Posts: 295

I use everything btrfs for some years now, I like lzo compression for faster readback for some uses - not particularly important but is nice anyway.

My most interesting use is probably an external drive which is complete btrfs formatted and has subvolumes for 6 permanent containers and if I need a new container I just create another subvolume and throw it in there.

vaxbrat · l33t Joined: 05 Oct 2005 Posts: 731 Location: DC Burbs