this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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Hold up. I thought btrfs was better than ext4?
Filesystems aren't so simple. Modern advanced filesystems like btrfs, zfs and bcachefs are more than just filesystems.
E.g. they include features like volume management, compression and sometimes encryption. Most features can also be achieved with for example ext4 + lvm + luks, but it's nice to have all in one system with unified configuration.
tl;dr
Btrfs does more than ext4, which can have a negative performance impact, depending on the use case/metric. Usually the features gained by btrfs outweigh the small difference in performance imo.
Oh. So I didn't need LVM and LUKS at my install?
Btrfs doesn't do encryption, so luks is still necessary. LVM isn't needed since btrfs subvolumes achieve the same in a more flexible way (no fixed size, snapshots).
Btrfs doesn't have built in encryption, if you want to encrypt Btrfs you still need another layer (e.g. LUKS).
It's mostly better, but not in every way. It has a lot of useful features, at a performance cost sometimes. A cost that historically wasn't a problem with spinning hard drives and relatively slow SATA SSDs but will show up more on really fast NVMes.
The snapshots, it has to keep track of what's been modified. Depending on the block size, an update of just a couple bytes can end up as a few 4k write because it's Copy-on-Write and it has to update a journal and it has to update the block list of the file. But at the same time, copying a 50GB file is instantaneous on btrfs because of the same CoW feature. Most people find the snapshots more useful than eeking out every last bit of performance out of your drive.
Even ZFS, often considered to be the gold standard of filesystems, is actually kinda slow. But its purpose isn't to be the fastest, its purpose is throwing an array of 200 drives at it and trusting it to protect you even against some media degradation and random bit flips in your storage with regular scrubs.
I'm sure this is a specific workload that BTRFS struggles with that others handle just fine.
Other workloads BTRFS will be better, and in others it will be worse. There's no one size fits all.
There are many other considerations besides startup speed, no? Filesystem reliability is a big one, and all the scrubbing and defragging features of btrfs are pretty neat
Valve decided on Ext4 for Steam Deck and did so probably not just for shits and giggles.