On Thu, Aug 06, 2026 at 05:59:10PM -0400, Nicholas D Steeves wrote: > I confirm that Fedora Desktop also uses btrfs by default. Meanwhile, > Fedora *server* defaults to XFS. SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop defaults > to btrfs. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server puts the rootfs on btrfs, but > uses XFS for data partitions. > > If we're going to use a future-directed metric for "what users want", > btrfs-progs popcon looks like it will overtake xfsprogs by the time Duke > is released. P.S. I still want to form a btrfs-enablement team, so > please let me know if you're interested! > > Some other factors that might be worth noting: XFS does not appear to > ever be considered for use on small systems like phones, firewalls, etc. > XFS also used to be more fragile than ext4 in cases of kernel panic, > sudden loss of power, etc, and as far as I know this is still the case. > Should we really make the default fs one that is designed for systems > that have redundant PSUs and UPSs? That doesn't sound very "do no harm" > to me, and in the same vein, there are workloads that trigger consumer > SSD-destroying write amplification with btrfs; this is why I'm not > pushing for btrfs-by-default at this time. > > One of our DDs is also significantly involved with ext4, but to the best > of my knowledge we don't have anyone who also works on upstream XFS. > I remember reading an argument about how this is an advantage when > upstream has breaking changes that need to be disentangled from bugfixes > targeting the LTS kernel that we follow.
Does xfs_repair still require potentially crazy amounts of ram for larger drives? After all is it unreasonable for someone to have a 4TB drive in a system with 8GB ram these days? My understanding is xfs_repair can't deal with that. I could have misunderstood it though. As for btrfs, I must admit I have not personally used it at all since experimenting with it briefly when it was very new, and I was rather unimpressed that a filesystem could claim to have free space in df but gave out of space errors if you tried to write files. To me that was too unfriendly to work with. Maybe it has gotten better since. I sure hope so. Of course the fact it ran out of space after 50GB written to an 80GB drive did not help make me want to play with it further. That seemed too inefficient. ext4 has never done me wrong and has always done everything I expected. -- Len Sorensen
