Ease of use

What does it take to set up a filesystem and use all its features?

There are virtually no extra steps required to use Btrfs, Ext4 or XFS. For years, they’ve been included in the Linux kernel, which means that any Linux system can mount such partitions without installing or configuring anything else. Formatting, growing, fixing filesystem errors and similar service tasks are performed by command-line utilities found in the btrfsprogs, e2fsprogs and xfsprogs packages available in any Linux distro. The same goes for NTFS – most mainstream distributions are normally capable of reading and writing on NTFS partitions.

So far so good, but we need to subtract a few points from Btrfs. Despite Btrfs’s killer feature being the built-in snapshots, you need to look for a tool to manage them. Some third-party tools do exist, but there isn’t any industry standard desktop integration for Btrfs snapshots similar to the time machine-like slider in the tweaked Nautilus version in OpenSolaris. We’re left with the CLI toolset from btrfs-progs, which is fine, but it sets a higher barrier to entry for novice Linux users. If you really want to go hardcore, though, try Reiser5. This filesystem is the most difficult to get up and running. For various reasons, the code isn’t part of the mainline Linux kernel, thus you need to manually get the kernel sources, patch it with the correct version of the Reiser5 patch, rebuild the whole thing, and then separately build the reiser4progs toolset.

There’s one more confusing thing: there is the older reiser4 kernel code and the newer one with the same name (but in another branch). Consequently, there are two versions of reiser4progs, plus the extra kernel feature for making the new filesystem format compatible with the previous one. You need to be very passionate about Reiser4/5 to get it right. There’s an easier way, though: the Metztli project (http://metztli.it) produces a custom Debian 11 minimal ISO, which comes with all things Reiser5 and uses that filesystem for its root partition. Perhaps this is the most unintrusive way of giving Reiser5 a whirl.

Sysbench comes with different benchmarks, including the file I/O stress test mode, which was perfect for the sequential write test we wanted to conduct.