XFS

You need to know mobile operating systems, such as iPadOS, iOS, and Android.

You need to understand various file system types, such as NTFS, REFS, FAT32, EXT4, XFS, APFS, and XFAT.

I also need to know vendor-to-life cycle limitations, end-of-life and update limitations, and understand the compatibility concerns between operating systems.

That's just one section of a very big Section 1, Domain 1, goes on for pages.

And now that I have a really functional SteamOS gaming PC, I'm really happy to get that stuff, and I do hope, uh, SteamOS does those updates relatively frequently.

And on that note, Phoronix did a nice benchmark of various popular Linux file systems, including Btrfs, Ext4, F2FS, and XFS.

This was all done on Ubuntu 26.10, a daily build of that distro, to get access to both the kernel 7.2 and the kernel 7.3, so to compare not only the file systems with each other, but also compare their evolution with those upcoming patches in the kernel 7.3. Now, overall, it looks like XFS is the file system that will give you the best performance, as in faster read and write speeds across the various tests that they performed.

Btrfs is much, much slower than all the other tested options, basically half the performance with the kernel 7.2 compared to XFS.

Ext4 and F2FS are not that far from XFS, a little bit slower, but not by much.

What is really interesting is the performance improvement to Btrfs in the kernel 7.3.

According to those benchmarks, it's 23% faster on average, which is insane.

This was tested on an SSD, of course, and of course, it's just a performance test on various benchmarks.

[laughs]

And I run NixOS with a XFS root-

I like that

... file system.

Got cut off on that last one.

Just wanted to let you know some more details.

As I said, I use XFS for the file system, uh, mostly because you told me in one of the episodes how that file system got some love in the la- latest Linux kernel update.

Mm-hmm.

But should a typical Linux desktop user switch to F2FS?

For most people, extension 4 or XFS is still the safer choice.

F2FS has some rough edges, like occasional compatibility issues with certain tools, and the cleaner can be a nuisance.

But if you're running a device with limited write endurance, F2FS can extend its life.