Comparing Filesystems: ext4 vs XFS vs Btrfs vs ZFS
A practical comparison of four major Linux filesystems — ext4, XFS, Btrfs, and ZFS — covering journaling vs copy-on-write, extent strategies, metadata overhead, and crash consistency.
A practical comparison of four major Linux filesystems — ext4, XFS, Btrfs, and ZFS — covering journaling vs copy-on-write, extent strategies, metadata overhead, and crash consistency.
A hands-on lab for creating a logical disk using a loopback device, formatting it with ext4, and exploring the initial filesystem structures like lost+found, the superblock, and metadata overhead.
A step-by-step lab on ext4 internals. Create files, inspect their inodes and extents, force fragmentation, and watch what happens to metadata before and after deletion.
Files deleted with `rm` don’t vanish instantly. Ext4 leaves behind traces — shadows on disk — that can sometimes be recovered with tools like debugfs. Let’s look behind the curtain.
A narrative walkthrough of what happens when you write a file to disk (through the page cache, extents, and journaling) and deletion with `rm`. Think "Lord of the Rings," but for inodes.