[Nottingham] I knew I'd forget something last night (filesystems and partitions)

[Martin]

I'll let others more fully comment first.


Brief notes:

I have a prejudice against the workings of XFS and ZFS...


For booting up a root partition, you can have complete freedom by using
for example a 256MByte /boot partition using ext4. (That can be smaller
if not using a initrd, needs to be 512MByte or so for some bloated distros.)

For current SSDs, there's no concern for wear levelling and so there is
no special concerns to favour using F2FS.


The big question is... What features/usage do you need?


Have fun!

Cheers,
Martin



On 15/05/2020 13:00, J J via Nottingham wrote:
> I want to start setting this server up. /, /home etc are on an SSD and
> chucking the whole of /var onto a logical volume sat on RAID1.Maybe not
> the most efficient use of space (I could have more partitions
> but...well...I like a simple life).
> 
> Anyhoo, then the question of filesystems comes up; BTRFS, Ext4, or XFS?
> On the SSD F2FS would probably be best, but it's not an option in the
> installer (simple life, see) and I had thought of going BTRFS but:
> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-50-filesystems&num=1
> So it came down to Ext4 Vs XFS.
> 
> I've plumped for XFS for no real reason other than "Never used it
> before" and "Seems it might be a smidge faster".
> 
> There's nothing critical on here yet, but is going with XFS madness? I
> was worried about RAM, but it seems it's not too bad. ZFS is totally out
> of the question as I simply don't have the RAM for it.
> 
> J.
>