EXT3 vs EXT4 vs XFS vs BTRFS - filesystems comparison on Linux kernel 3.0.0
Almost one year passed from my latest all-around Linux filesystem comparison, and a lot of things changed. First, I discovered that, while Fedora documentation stated that ext3 write barriers were enabled by default, they were not correctly activated on my test setup. This inflated ext3 benchmarks in a unfair manner. Second, a lot of kernel development activity happened: xfs got some much-needed metadata handling speedup, btrfs saw intensive performance optimization and write barriers were replaced by FUAs [1].