Question

Why are there so many Linux filesystems? (ext*, ReiserFs, btrfs, vfat, JFS, XFS, nilfs2)

How do they compare to Windows' NTFS or Mac OSX's filesystem?

Answer 1

The freedom of Open Source includes whoever is willing to write the code to support a file system is welcome to and it will be folded into the distrobution.

I had ext2, then ext3 running on my old Linux box for 13 years. I've had XFS (from SGI) running on my former fileserver at work since 1997. I've (knock wood) never had problems with either.

I trust either of those filesystems more than I trust either NTFS or HFS.

Answer 2

I am thinking of using btrfs, because it is Better (tm), but it keeps warning me about having no implementation of "fsck" yet. How does btrfs compare to ext4?

Answer 3

heh, what were the authors of UNIX and the tools thinking when they named their OS UNIX (keep saying it out loud), their "display to stdout" utility `cat', and their chkdsk utility `fsck'

Answer 4

rsmith6559 answered the why.

I haven't checked on more modern results but last I checked, btrfs has overall inferior performance BUT superior read performance and read speed is more important than write speed (at least for me).

It also has features such as data deduplication (makes links to a previous copy of a file you have two or more copies of rather than wasting the same amount of space again), online defragmentation, transparent compression, etc.

I strongly suggest you don't use btrfs for a production environment because the fsck tool is what saves your a$$ if something goes wrong such as a power outage.

As for the nomenclature of things, I'd say they took words, concatenated them and them removed letters for brevity.

Answer 5

Unix was written in 1970. At that time, each byte was valuable. Vowels are usually superfluous. Considering Unix' ties with the C programming language, where terseness is a virtue, and short command names result.

Shortening ConcAtenaTe to cat, and File System ChecK to fsck also makes them easier to type.

Answer 6

As for comparing to NTFS, ext3, ext4, and btrfs, for instance, are much more fragmentation resistant. I don't know about MAC's filesystem(s). I find that filesystems from the Linux (and probably the other open source "brothers" or "fathers" or whatever) world prevent issues from happening instead of dealing with them after they happen. For example, NTFS is not fragmentation resistant (or very little) but Windows 7 routinely defragments in the background whereas ext4 would just prevent the "damage" (although it could be actual damage from excessive use of the disks from the defragmentation process) from happening in the first place. I speak from experience and not any hard-core data but I doubt I'm wrong.