Your welcome and thanks for the link, I do not know it :-)
Generally speaking I prefer experience than testing, no matter how accurate they are, I can't really tell if nilfs2 is rock solid or not due to the too little experience I have, however it's an old (so patched enough) project by a Japan telco that I think use it internally so I feel a bit of trust, the rest is covered by a good and tested backup that can't be left apart in any case and with NixOS/GuixSD even a root fs crash is not a big issue since replicate it's only a matter of copy few (possibly one) text files and let the installer do it's business... So my main point is that nilfs2 it's far lighter than zfs, it's considered safe on GNU/Linux (zfs is not) and it offer a good protection against accidental overwrite/deletion that on a desktop is important for me, even with the best and quickest backup I can imaging... I've probably remained on zfs if nilfs2 was not in kernel officially supported since years but being already there, lightweight enough it's my default choice hoping/dreaming for a different future...
The rest of panorama is really bad:
- xfs is essentially dead, like jfs
- btrfs is a shitload of bugs
- zfs can't be integrated and it's considered not production-ready on GNU/Linux
- ext* are fs from another era, without nothing of the good things of xfs/jfs
- stratis is for now more a dubious dream and not a real solution, only a way to poorly circumvent actual sorry state of storage
- bcachefs is a promise, but for now it does not offer anything relevant
- f2fs have nice performance but it's a bit buggy IME and it's even more limited than nilfs2 to a point of being unuseful...
Outside of GNU/Linux IllumOS (despite it's zombie status) and FreeBSD have a good zfs support, production ready, DragonFlyBSD have hammer, the rest is as worse as Linux world...
- XFS is actively developed with the linux kernel.
- stratis is kind of the traditional approach of a layered approach to filesystems instead of building the features into each filesystem. This has traditionally been a workable solution. It's reasonable to expect this to be workable going forward if not immediately.
- ZFS is 13 years old now and very much battle tested at this point. ZFS on linux goes back an entire decade.
Much of what you are running is just tested code running via a layer to provide compatibility with a different unix like OS. In fact its funny that you should mention FreeBSD considering freeBSD's will be running code based on zfs on linux.
"In the past few years the vast majority of new development in ZFS has taken place in DelphixOS and zfsonlinux (ZoL). Earlier this year Delphix announced that they will be moving to ZoL"
"While working through the git history of ZoL I have also discovered that many races and locking bugs have been fixed in ZoL and never made it back to Illumos and thus FreeBSD. This state of affairs has led to a general agreement among the stakeholders that I have spoken to that it makes sense to rebase FreeBSD's ZFS on ZoL."
It seems that freebsd thinks that zfs on linux is not only production ready its better and more bug free than the illumOS version.
It's hard to imagine a universe where zfs on linux isn't considered sufficiently production ready despite having received man centuries of effort over more than a decade while hammer2 the result of what less than a man year of total effort over 4 years is. This is not to denigrate the authors efforts. DragonflyBSD and hammer2 look quite interesting.
You see a glass half empty wasteland lacking in any good options I see an embarrassment of riches current and upcoming.
XFS is maintained not "developed" anymore (despite RH/Oracle little push), as Dave Chinner announce time ago (at Vault conference few years ago, if I remember correctly) simply saying that Irix glorious time was a thing of the past and xFS codebase can't comply to modern needs so it should be considered a legacy solution...
Stratis is essentially a wrapper around actual Linux storage that try to hide it's limitation and being a RH project I expect tons of bugs and idiosyncrasy...
Zfs is battle tested on OpenSolaris, witch is unfortunately dead and IllumOS devs simply can't keep up the project, LLNL Linux port despite it's fantastic work is still not production ready on GNU/Linux despite many use it in production (including on non-ECC ram machines!)...
I tend to be pessimistic as you rightly say but I do not see any "rich present" and good upcoming future.
A small things: while I'm not much interest in "voting" and "gamification" (and they are NOT part of hacker culture) when people upvote/downvote a post WHY THE HELL they do not COMMENT to explain their reasoning?
I see this trend few times here and it's quietly interesting: one can say "hey you state a false thing" or "I disagree because of this and that". That's help us all to understand something, expand even if a little bit our knowledge, form an opinion with stronger roots/more data etc. Otherwise it's seems to be far more like a censorship mechanism disguised by "a way to promote more interesting contents".
Think a bit about that, we miss usenet, many do not even use mailing lists at all, to few have time and resources to keep up personal websites, it's hard without a common mean of communication to reach personal websites... As a result even platforms like HN can potentially drive "the community" (in the most ample sense) to a certain direction desired not by us but by the platform holder itself or someone who abuse the platform "gamified" mechanism.
Downvote for disagree is a poor strategy. For example I didn't downvote you.
Downvotes are more useful for low quality posts that don't contribute. If something is a distraction or disruption or just plain not useful sometimes engaging would just magnify the degree of disruption or time wasting and its easier to downvote and move on.
In fact something that is worth engaging on is almost always not worthy of downvoting. In fact if you downvote the post people are less likely to read YOUR post and if it comes to pass you are correct you will have missed out on the opportunity to inform readers who now wont read the parent post you are replying to or yours.
In the end people are likely to downvote because its easier to click a little arrow than write something. I wonder if one could weigh more heavily those posts which are simultaneously downvoted and not replied to.
IMO in today's community (too big and less and less acculturated in any sense than the past) we need personal websites that collect peoples public ideas and a discussion platform like usenet. On usenet there is a continuous stream of contents, valuable one may then end-up in some personal sites and being cited in future posts so newcomers can still discover it when needed/desired while not much valuable one slowly or quickly be forgotten in ngs history's...
Gamification while have some "attraction" for many does not really guarantee that valuable contents remain available and tend to push far more extreme/non valuable contents fading into oblivion most interest stuff that might be "elitist" by nature... This, of course, while NOT counting all possible abuse in both "artificial downvote" and pushing extra contents to "censor by oblivion" unwanted contents.
Splitting platforms like StackExchange or HN vs Facebook might help and might reduce abuses but IMO it's certainly not an answer...
Agree with the sentiment on XFS. It will be interesting to see what the future ‘unifying’ file system will be for Linux given Btrfs is dead as a donut (afaik).
Your statement on ZFS is factually incorrect, I would say. iXsystems develop and support plenty of enterprise grade systems with ZFS on Linux. The OpenZFS project is alive and kicking with several platforms including FreeBSD and Linux. FreeBSD has run off the OpenSolaris upstream source for years, but has recently announced they are rebasing to ZFS on Linux [1]. This means less / no fiddling around with feature flags to share file systems between FreeBSD and Linux. Long live OpenZFS!
Can't comment on others, but ZFS. I fell in love with FreeBSD + ZFS when I set up a dedicated file server. The ease of use, feature set, integration, and reliability is just lovely. At times, I cannot believe that I'm getting all of it for free from an open source project (Ex-NetApp er, who was amazed by WAFL before touching ZFS).
Having said that, I don't think rebasing to ZoL is a bad idea as long as intentions are right(FreeBSD being considered as equal, and not an after thought. No commit should be allowed if it breaks CI with FreeBSD without exceptions). Having ZFS bridging the Linux and BSD storage realms can be amazing. Also, more open source eyes on a singular OpenZFS project the better.
In the past I'd loved zfs and I still love it's physical volume management ability and it's concept of pooled storage however after years I choose to ditch it.
XFS is the default filesystem for current RHEL [1] and SLES [2] (data partitions only in the latter case); it is as far as possible away from being "essentially dead" as a Linux filesystem can possibly be.
Yep, than go looking at xFS commits history, mailing list activities, websites (sgi site dead, xfs.org abandoned)... It's "live" in the sense that's bugfixed when bug spot around but there is essentially ZERO new futures, even in 2015 one of it's lead devs say it's legacy, damn that I do not find a video of the talk...
If you have to choose today a classic, rock solid, battle-tested fs than xFS can be the best remaining choice on GNU/Linux. Nilfs2 is too little used and known to be "battle tested" and it's development it's extremely slow. But the rest is only experiments, bugsware, legacy or specific-purpose storage, nothing more.
A couple minutes with a search engine finds several articles on new features such as "XFS online filesystem scrubbing and repair" [1][2], as well as plans for a substantial interface rework to implement subvolumes and snapshots [3], from this year.
So I assume that someone still want to keep it up, however if an ancient core developer, years ago (2015) already depict the project as at a dead end...
IMO it's only a way to keep up something that's needed awaiting for alternatives, do not forget how many reason, many like Andrew Morton and his "rampant layer violation" when he first meed zfs...
I've been using it for a long time and it's been rock solid. It just lacks the features of filesystems like zfs, btrfs, hammer, and bcachefs. But it's also very stable, is a tried and true filesystem, and exists right now on Linux.
If I remember correctly at a Vault Conference few years ago Dave Chinner say that xFS codebase while actively maintained should be considered legacy since it's not really possible evolve it anymore and the better way to go is a complete re-design so a new filesystem, a thing that will not happen in xFS upstream... I do not find any transcript now, but looking for it somewhere in the web surely exists :-)
So yes, it's rock solid and battle tested, certainly a safe choice respect of btrfs (buggy and not really good in production despite many do not care) or bcachefs (solid, stable, but essentially feature-less in today's implementation) but nothing more... RH and Oracle seems to push it a bit inconstantly but I still have to see any real plan...
Generally speaking I prefer experience than testing, no matter how accurate they are, I can't really tell if nilfs2 is rock solid or not due to the too little experience I have, however it's an old (so patched enough) project by a Japan telco that I think use it internally so I feel a bit of trust, the rest is covered by a good and tested backup that can't be left apart in any case and with NixOS/GuixSD even a root fs crash is not a big issue since replicate it's only a matter of copy few (possibly one) text files and let the installer do it's business... So my main point is that nilfs2 it's far lighter than zfs, it's considered safe on GNU/Linux (zfs is not) and it offer a good protection against accidental overwrite/deletion that on a desktop is important for me, even with the best and quickest backup I can imaging... I've probably remained on zfs if nilfs2 was not in kernel officially supported since years but being already there, lightweight enough it's my default choice hoping/dreaming for a different future...
The rest of panorama is really bad:
- xfs is essentially dead, like jfs
- btrfs is a shitload of bugs
- zfs can't be integrated and it's considered not production-ready on GNU/Linux
- ext* are fs from another era, without nothing of the good things of xfs/jfs
- stratis is for now more a dubious dream and not a real solution, only a way to poorly circumvent actual sorry state of storage
- bcachefs is a promise, but for now it does not offer anything relevant
- f2fs have nice performance but it's a bit buggy IME and it's even more limited than nilfs2 to a point of being unuseful...
Outside of GNU/Linux IllumOS (despite it's zombie status) and FreeBSD have a good zfs support, production ready, DragonFlyBSD have hammer, the rest is as worse as Linux world...