On 11/01/2025 at 19:37, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
On Thu, Jan 09, 2025 at 09:21:25PM +0100, Matej Marko wrote:
I read, that F2FS works on HDD the same reliably as on SSD.
F2FS was not designed for HDD nor SSD with sophisticated flash controllers.
F2FS was designed for raw nand flash drives
F2FS was designed for "dumb" flash drives such as USB sticks, SD/MMC
cards or PCMCIA memory cards. They have a simpler integrated flash
controller than SSD, but they are not "raw flash".
It is not tolerant of power failures
Even when mounting with barrier,fsync_mode=strict ?
(so fine on a phone or tablet
that has battery and knows the power state, not so fine on a generic PC).
But fine on a laptop PC.
On a drive with built in management of the flash, as any SSD used in a
PC has, ext4 is a much better choice than F2FS with better performance
and better reliability.
So Debian and Ubuntu have sensibly not bothered to offer the user the
choice to use a filesystem that would be a terrible idea to use in
general.
I don't know about Ubuntu, but Debian does not target only generic PC
but also a wide range of hardware, including ARM boards which usually
boot from a SD card or USB stick. Even on PC, a portable installation on
USB stick could come in handy. Also udeb packages providing F2FS kernel
module and tools are available for the Debian installer and even
included in installation ISO images, so I assume that adding F2FS
support was considered at some point.
F2FS works just fine when used in the right place, which is on raw
flash chips
AFAIK F2FS works only on block devices and raw flash memory chips are
managed by the Linux kernel as MTD (memory technology device), not block
devices. Specific flash filesystems such as YAFFS or UBIFS have been
designed for raw MTD.
