The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/ECrispy on 2024-06-18 15:13:30.
This is for home desktop usage, not servers/data centers where XFS is far more common.
performance - in every test I could find, XFS is near the top, beating btrfs/ext4. Its esp good for parallel workloads and almost everything on a modern desktop is like that. The only perf concern I read about is it used to have higher cpu usage for updating metadata but I believe thats been fixed and no longer relevant?
(I think for most users, performance in benchmarks may not be noticeable and other features matter more, but its still an important consideration)
SSD/OS installs - XFS is almost as fast as f2fs for these. I see no reason why anyone would use f2fs on anything other than a sd card or on any NAND device with wear leveling.
CoW/snapshots - this is no doubt a very powerful feature of zfs/btrfs. But I see very little mention of reflinks/snapshots on XFS which can achieve a lot of this. They are not atomic but enough to satisfy a lot of use cases. I don't see support for this in the usual tools like snapper/timeshift either. XFS also has support for deduping. All of this comes without the usual cost of CoW
other features - dynamic inodes (on ext4 an inode for every 16kb/256kb is wasteful, even if most people never notice it), automatic fsck, journalling (sure, copied from ext3, but thats not a bad thing)
stability/reliability - I don't think there should be any doubt about this. Its a proven enterprise class fs with a hallowed pedigree and reputation, is now backed by RHEL and has probably seen more active development than most other file systems.
The biggest factor seems to be that the default ext4 is good enough, and frankly most people will not care or know about, and should not care, about the underlying fs. There are also distros like Fedora/OpenSuse that used to use XFS as the default and have switched to btrfs. I don't know of anything that uses XFS as default except unRaid now - unRaid is used to manage TBs by home users and that probably says something.
The only concerns I've found are -
a) it doesn't support shrinking a volume. how common is this anyway? I've never seen any home user need to do this, 99% of the time you only need this when you are installing another OS on the same ssd/hdd and need to shrink your current /, which is an advanced use case.
b)supposedly XFS doesn't handle hw failures. Even on this I found no consensus - some people say its risky and can corrupt with no recovery, others say even with a forced shutdown its safe. I'm not sure if its any less robust than ext4/btrfs? Is this actually a concern these days?