Aaron Toponce

Well, not exactly "benchmarking" in the strictest sense, but interesting data I find nonetheless. Setting out on my voyage to learn more about filesystems that the Linux kernel supports, I went looking for which filesystem does the best job at managing space. No speed tests. No data integrity. No feature comparisons. Just space conservation. Of course, I plan on investigating these filesystems further on those notes, and will report my findings, but suffice it for now to compare space utilization.

First, I have 6 2GB USB thumb drives for this test. Unfortunately, 2 of them are slightly smaller than the other 4. As such, I felt that LVM would be a good solution for making sure each filesystem was put on the exact same storage container.

The result? 6 logical volumes exactly the same size, each with 486 PEs with 4MB per PE. Each filesystem was mounted to it's own directory under /mnt:

aaron@kratos:~ 4149 % df -h /dev/mapper/test-*
Filesystem              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/test-ext2   1.9G  2.9M  1.8G   1% /mnt/ext2
/dev/mapper/test-ext3   1.9G   35M  1.8G   2% /mnt/ext3
/dev/mapper/test-jfs    1.9G  376K  1.9G   1% /mnt/jfs
/dev/mapper/test-reiser 1.9G   33M  1.9G   2% /mnt/reiser
/dev/mapper/test-vfat   1.9G  4.0K  1.9G   1% /mnt/vfat
/dev/mapper/test-xfs    1.9G  288K  1.9G   1% /mnt/xfs

Next, I needed to populate these filesystems with some data. I ran the following for-loop:

Let's see how they fared:

aaron@kratos:~ 4166 % df -h /dev/mapper/test-*
Filesystem              Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/test-ext2   1.9G  492M  1.3G  28% /mnt/ext2
/dev/mapper/test-ext3   1.9G  524M  1.3G  29% /mnt/ext3
/dev/mapper/test-jfs    1.9G  489M  1.5G  26% /mnt/jfs
/dev/mapper/test-reiser 1.9G  521M  1.4G  27% /mnt/reiser
/dev/mapper/test-vfat   1.9G  489M  1.5G  26% /mnt/vfat
/dev/mapper/test-xfs    1.9G  489M  1.5G  26% /mnt/xfs

VFAT, XFS and JFS all seem to do fairly well on data conservation. Knowing that the FAT filesystem isn't very robust, or feature-packed, looking at just this data, I would be willing to spend some time further with JFS and XFS. However, to be fair, I'll give FAT a good look in respect to features.

It is a pity however, that Sun Microsystem's ZFS is licensed under the CDDL. I would rather enjoy working with that filesystem, I think, as it supports a great set of features. Unfortunately, unless ZFS is ported to the GPL, it's unlikely that we'll see it in kernel space, and I'm not really interested in an implementation of it under FUSE.