Ted Ts’o sent out the EXT4 updates today for Linux 6.11. He explained in that pull request:
“Many cleanups and bug fixes in ext4, especially for the fast commit feature. Also some performance improvements; in particular, improving IOPS and throughput on fast devices running Async Direct I/O by up to 20% by optimizing jbd2_transaction_committed().”
I’m not quite sure why people are still worried about the stability of btrfs when it has been rock solid for years. Synology has been using it for quite a while now in their NAS systems, they surely wouldn’t if it’d mean a lot of customers were at risk of losing their data.
There are valid reasons not to be using btrfs (although I’d argue most ordinary use cases don’t have a valid reason), but stability certainly isn’t one of them, independent of the distribution used (unless it’s ancient).
Note my research of BTRFS is almost a year old now. And there was still a few headlines making round of problems with BTRFS in some cases. A controlled NAS system is not the same as random user configuration of a random desktop user. And as said in my comment, I was not sure if it would be stable for my installation (when I did my research) and did not claim it to be unstable. On the other side, I know for a fact that EXT4 is stable and I did not research more or experiment to find out which one is better for me.
Current state of BTRFS: https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Status.html (note when I did my research, Linux was at Kernel v6.4, therefore BTRFS was in a worse situation than today)
Wait til your table with all the checksums gets messed up on an “older” btrfs install. Happened to me on a VM because I didn’t know copy-on-write should be disabled for large frequently partially updated files. It also slowed that VMs IO down a lot.
Like most file systems, BTRFS is great if you know the edge cases. I recently moved to ZFS on my new work system, which has been a great change in terms of in-line snapshots and the like.
If EXT4 meets your needs, that’s awesome. If you understand how to use a different FS well or are willing to learn (and risk), I would also encourage other options as well.
