Improving ext4: bigalloc, inline data, and metadata checksums

Add to this the fact that you did not need to reformat your system to use ext3 when upgrading, and the fact that ext3 became the standard (taking over from ext2, which was the prior standard) is a no-brainer, and no conspiracy.

In those days XFS would outperform ext3, but only in benchmarks on massive disk arrays (which were even more out of people's price ranges at that point then they are today)

XFS was scalable to high-end systems, but it's low-end performance was mediocre

looking at things nowdays, XFS has had a lot of continuous improvement and integration, both improving it's high-end performance and reliability, and improving it's low-end performance without loosing it's scalability. There are also more people, working for more companies supporting it, making it far less of a risk today, with far more in the way of upsides.

JFS has received very little attention after the initial code dump from IBM, and there is now nobody actively maintaining/improving it, so it really isn't a good choice going forward.

reiserfs had some interesting features and performance, but it suffered from some seriously questionably benchmarking (the one that turned me off to it entirely was a spectacular benchmarking test that reiserfs completed in 20 seconds that took several minutes on ext*, but then we discovered that reiserfs defaulted to a 30 second delay before writing everything to disk, so the entire benchmark was complete before any day started getting written to disk, after that I didn't trust anything that they claimed), and a few major problems (the fsck scrambling is a huge one). It was then abandoned by the developer in favor of the future reiserfs4, with improvements that were submitted being rejected as they were going to be part of the new, incompatible filesystem.

ext4 is in large part a new filesystem who's name just happens to be similar to what people are running, but it has now been out for several years, with developers who are responsive to issues, are a diverse set (no vendor lock-in or dependencies) and are willing to say where the filesystem is not the best choice.

btrfs is still under development (the fact that they don't yet have a fsck tool is telling), is making claims that seem too good to be true, and have already run into several cases where they have pathalogical behavior and have had to modify things significantly. I wouldn't trust it for anything other than non-critical personal use for another several years.

as a result, I am currently using XFS for the most part, but once I get a chance to do another round of testing, ext4 will probably join it. I have a number of systems that have significant numbers of disks, so XFS will probably remain in use.