6-Way File-System Comparison On The Linux 4.1 Kernel

Written by Michael Larabel in Software on 2 July 2015 at 12:40 PM EDT. Page 1 of 3. 15 Comments.

With the Linux 4.1 kernel having recently been released, I decided to conduct a fresh round of file-system comparisons on this new kernel using a solid-state drive. The file-systems tested in this article were the in-tree EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, F2FS, ReiserFS, and NILFS2 file-systems while a follow-up article will take a look at the out-of-tree contenders like Reiser4 and ZFS atop Linux 4.1.

EXT4, Btrfs, F2FS, XFS, ReiserFS, and NILFS2 were all tested from the Linux 4.1.0 kernel with their default mount options and using their latest user-space programs as packaged on Ubuntu 15.10 Wily development. The solid-state drive used for testing these file-systems was a Mushkin 120GB ECO2 MKNSSDEC120GB Serial ATA 3.0 solid-state drive. The ZFS tests weren't included in this article as only a few days ago an updated ZOL was released and waiting for Reiser4 Linux 4.1 support before testing these non-mainline modules.

All the benchmarks happened from the usual Core i7 5960X Haswell-E system. For those wondering how EXT4 / Btrfs / XFS over time, there are Fedora and Ubuntu systems testing the latest mainline kernel code daily over on LinuxBenchmarking.com. Today's article was a special comparison in the Phoronix lab using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite automated benchmarking software.


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