Compelling reasons to switch ? [LWN.net]

Compelling reasons to switch ?

Posted Jan 23, 2026 17:59 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Compelling reasons to switch ? by Lionel_Debroux
Parent article: Filesystem medley: EROFS, NTFS, and XFS

> Performance, really ?

"Security" is not the focus of most users... as opposed to things like "don't eat my data".. and yes, "performance".

Filesystems are routinely benchmarked on "performance". But you can't sell "security" the same way.

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Compelling reasons to switch ?

Posted Jan 24, 2026 8:08 UTC (Sat) by Lionel_Debroux (subscriber, #30014) [Link]

Nearly 20 years ago, after the first few releases of ntfs-3g fixed the initial performance issues with large files, ntfs-3g was much faster than HDDs anyway. When dealing with a PCIe Gen5 NVME SSD sporting millions of IOPS and a transfer rate in the GB/s range, there could be a speed and/or CPU consumption difference between a kernel space filesystem and a user space filesystem, right. However, it remains to be seen whether the latter isn't good enough for _most users_ on those metrics.

I guess I'll wait for benchmarks to be posted on e.g. Phoronix.

Compelling reasons to switch ?

Posted Jan 29, 2026 15:25 UTC (Thu) by LionsPhil (subscriber, #121073) [Link]

I don't think that really applies when it comes to file system implementations. For the vast majority of users you're not presented with a choice; you're going to get whatever your GUI filer autoselects when you click the icon for the drive, or mount autoselects when you just do "mount /dev/sdb1 /tmp/whatever".

Which is putting the decision in the hands of distro, kernel, util-linux, KIO, whatever-GNOME's-is-called, etc. maintainers. I assume that's going to be more influenced by "which one gets me the fewest severe bug reports?"

Add to that that a lot of filesystem performance pressure comes from the server role, but...hopefully the number of people choosing to use NTFS on Linux servers is small. :D As a reverse-engineered-for-interoperability filesystem, this is more the remit of client systems supporting being able to read that Windows-world external drive you plugged in. And, consequently, at *more* risk of vulnerabilities in the filesystem driver.

(I just wish ntfs-3g supported sparse files. NTFS itself does.)