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SiliconWizard:
On Linux, what alternative(s) to ext4 are you using, if anything? Why? And finally, How much experience you have with it and have you run into any particular issue?

My interest would not be (for the time being at least) for the root partition, but just for "data", including very small to very large files.

RoGeorge:
Big fan of ZFS here.  Works flawless, and has features most other filesystems don't even dream about.  Read what it can do, and you'll probably want/need at least a handful of those features.

Have ZFS on the daily desktop (Kubuntu with ZFS on root) and on another FreeBSD OS (where ZFS is builtin).  Ubuntu with ZFS on root can do rollbacks at boot (back and forth), if needed.  That's an Ubuntu experimental feature, but similar functionality can be achieved with other tools.  Both the SSD and the HDD seems to be fine with it.  ZFS is SSD friendly by its nature.

It is said ZFS is memory hungry (particularly when deduplication is enabled), though I don't need/use sector deduplication, and never noticed any memory hogging (the desktop has 32GB RAM).  :-//

tunk:
The default in RHEL (+clones) is xfs. Never had any problems.

DiTBho:

--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on May 20, 2023, 06:44:43 am ---On Linux, what alternative(s) to ext4 are you using, if anything?

--- End quote ---


* for both my routers and servers: xfs-v4
* on my graphical terminal: ext2

--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on May 20, 2023, 06:44:43 am ---Why?

--- End quote ---

Compared to ext2 and ext3 (=ext2+journalling), I prefer the design of xfs, it's more linear, and it better suits 4GB microdrives (I am MD addicted). For me, xfs is more reliable and offers some practical possibilities to resume your files from a catastrophic filesystem disaster, while with ext3 you have rather zero possibilities.

ext2 is simpler, consumes less ram, and has less cache pressure, so it's perfect as ram-rootfs.
Also I don't even need any "journaling" for things that are "volatile" (only stay in ram).


--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on May 20, 2023, 06:44:43 am ---How much experience you have with it and have you run into any particular issue?

--- End quote ---

worst encountered catastrophic filesystem disasters:

* A terrible bug in Bash made a script go nuts to the point it deleted a whole subtree. Files went lost because ext3 doesn't offer "undelete", so when you delete something ... you should immediately freeze and unmount your filesystem to later "raw" analysis, otherwise the things just deleted things are still on the harddisk as "data" content, but since their inodes are no more registered your data will be overwritten as soon as the kernel issues a data allocation, even for temporary files.

I got my lost files back with a C program I wrote myself to search raw in /dev/sdc2 for patterns and grab the whole block, then rebuild every lost file piece by piece. Thank god, the lost files were only assembly and C files, so "text" files rather than "binary" files.
* the PCI-X-SATA controller on my HPPA big iron went nuts due to a bug with the CPU bus caching causing the CPU to randomly stuff holes of { 0x00 0x00 0x00 ... } here and there into files. Again here you have little survival chances with ext3 because if an inode is corrupted and seen as "unregistered" you quickly have things overwritten
I have ZERO experiences with ext4, anyway :-//

DiTBho:

--- Quote from: tunk on May 20, 2023, 11:26:02 am ---The default in RHEL (+clones) is xfs. Never had any problems.

--- End quote ---

just, v3? v4? v5?
they behave differently, and they are not 100% down-compatible

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