"Recently, Linux has been undergoing something of a
revolution with a respect to file systems. There are a number of
projects including ext4 (See ext4 File System: Introduction and
Benchmarks), squashfs, nilfs which have made it into the kernel,
and tux3, which hasn't made it into the kernel yet but is under
heavy development.
"And perhaps most importantly, btrfs. Btrfs holds the promise of
giving Linux many enterprise class file system features similar to
ZFS (See Solving Common Administration Problems with ZFS and ZFS on
FUSE) but with even more features and better performance. In fact,
many Linux experts think that btrfs is one of the keys to the
future of Linux. While btrfs is not quite ready to be your only
file system, it is in the kernel ready for testing and is still
undergoing very heavy development.
"In this article we will introduce the key features of btrfs
find out how it compares to existing file systems. We will also
test it using iozone, with the understanding that it's still in
development so performance will likely change over time."
