Emerging Filesystems for Linux (emphasis on emerging)

All this reading about filesystems reminded me of a set of articles I read comparing a lot of the new Linux filesystems. The third part is really the most important except for details about how to actually get some of these running:

• Linux filesystems part 3: Comparing the standard filesystems

This roundup covered Ext2, Ext3, XFS, JFS, and ReiserFS for a baseline and then examined ChunkFS, NILFS, btrfs, Ext4, Reiser4, ZFS/FUSE, and ZFS/OpenSolaris. What I think most people don’t realize is that there have been a number of performance improvements in Ext3 in the 2.6 Linux kernel. In the real world tests Ext3 had the best performance of the total time for all tests. Of course, some of the numbers don’t look entirely right to me but the point is that Ext3 does pretty well, and is much faster than it used to be. Through in the fact that it is the most tested and compatible filesystem I think it’s an easy choice for systems. The features that would be nice that Ext3 is lacking are data checksumming and filesystem-level snapshots and, thus, I agree with the author that btrfs is one of the filesystems to watch.