Comment by rhinoceraptor
6 years ago
Other than esoteric high performance use cases, I'm not really sure why you would really need a plethora of filesystems. And the list of them that can be actually trusted is very short.
6 years ago
Other than esoteric high performance use cases, I'm not really sure why you would really need a plethora of filesystems. And the list of them that can be actually trusted is very short.
I'd like to agree, but I don't think the exceptions are all that esoteric. Like most people I'd consider XFS to be the default choice on Linux. It's a solid choice all around, and also has some features like project quota and realtime that others don't. OTOH, even in this thread there's plenty of sentiment around btrfs and bcachefs because of their own unique features (e.g. snapshots). Log-structured filesystems still have a lot of promise to do better on NVM, though that promise has been achingly slow to materialize. Most importantly, having generic functionality implemented in a generic subsystem instead of in a specific filesystem allows multiple approaches to be developed and compared on a level playing field, which is better for innovation overall. Glomming everything together stifles innovation on any specific piece, as network/peripheral-bus vendors discovered to their chagrin long ago.