this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2024
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XFS still isn't a multi-device filesystem, though... of course you can run it on top of mdraid/LVM, but that still doesn't come close to the flexibility of what these specialized filesystems can do. Being able to simply run
btrfs device add /dev/sdx1 /
and immediately having the new space available is far less hassle than adding a device to an md array, then resizing the partition and then resizing the filesystem (and removing a device is even worse). Snapshots are a similar deal - sure, LVM can let you snapshot your entire virtual block device, but your snapshots are block devices themselves which need to be explicitly mounted, while in btrfs/bcachefs a snapshot is just a directory, and can be isolated to a specific subvolume rather than the entire block device.Data checksums are also substantially less useful when the filesystem can't address the underlying devices individually, because it makes repairing the data from a replica impossible. If you have a file on an md RAID1 device and one of the replicas has a bad block, you might be able to detect the bitrot by verifying the checksum, but you can't actually fix it, because even though there is a second copy of the data on another drive, mdadm simply exposes a simple block device and doesn't provide any way to read from "the other copy". mdraid can recover from total drive failure, but not data corruption.