4 thoughts on “XFS vs ZFS

  1. On Linux? Yes, between those two choices, on that system, XFS is better because it doesn’t have to run in the userspace. That’s really no way to compare them, however: it’s like trying to bench a Java program against something in assembler. No serious server admin would run a userspace filesystem anyway–the performance hit is too high.

    The unfortunate thing is that there haven’t been any tests of ZFS against Linux FSs that haven’t been apples-to-oranges. My hope is that the licensing issues get worked out (even if ZFS goes GPL3, there’s still the legal grey area of getting that in the kernel, but at least some enterprising soul can patch it on his own) and we Linux users can try this ocean-boiling filesystem for ourselves.

  2. Feels it’s better? Yes.
    Has any explanation other than “ZFS isn’t going to happen for linux due to the license”? Not so much.
    Shows any benchmark numbers supporting his choice? No.

    Anyways, I guess this is in the ‘asides’ category. 🙂

  3. I agree. I’ve used XFS for years and been very happy with it. I got nailed by an actual bug once that resulted in file system corruption of a mail folder. The SGI guys had already fixed it and had a HOWTO out on how to fix it. Was tedious, but the fix worked. But I’ve used XFS on numerous production servers including some that went through some rough times for OTHER reasons resulting in plenty of unscheduled reboots – XFS never missed a beat.

  4. An alpha release of ZFS on Linux done by someone other than Sun’s ZFS team is beaten slightly by XFS on Linux? Shocking! (that’s sarcasm by the way).

    XFS by the way is always my choice of a FS on Linux: JFS for boot and XFS for the rest.

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