Ask HN: Anyone using f2fs in real-life scenarios?<p>I've test-run f2fs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F2FS) on several laptops and various devices booting from external USB/MMC devices in the past month. The subjective perception of the change in performance (from standard ext4) is evident. I was thinking very seriously about changing all my non-HDD-based devices to f2fs when I stumbled upon this:<p>https://www.usenix.org/system/files/atc19-jaffer.pdf<p>Basicaly, it says that f2f2s doesn't do as much checking for hardware errors as ext4 and tends to fail silently when there's a problem with the physical medium. This worries me and makes me want to stop using it - but the paper in question is more than a couple of years old and f2fs has continued to evolve, patches have been submitted to the Linux kernel and so on.<p>Anyone using f2fs care to share his/her experience with it?
Put it on my laptop (with ssd) for my workholic use. Heavy development,docker,K8s, javascript/node/webpack, browsing, etc.etc. etc.<p>10 months+ no issues (with Manjaro on /), really happy with it. The performance jump was really noticeable (subjectively).<p>Last week updated kernel branch from 5.4 to 5.10 (wifi card finally works on 5.10, knock,knock) and again no issues at all.<p>Various articles and benchmarks:
<a href="https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&q=F2FS" rel="nofollow">https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&q=F2FS</a><p>Recommending.
I've used F2FS before and ran into similar problems mentioned. My partition became unusable and fsck.f2fs didn't help. I lost the files, but thankfully had backups.<p>Since then, I have found that exFAT was better suited to my use case.<p>This was a few years ago now, I came away from the experience thinking the ideas are nice but it needs more time to mature.<p>Obviously this is all anecdotal, I've lost partitions to plenty of filesystems before, but the fact that little to no data recovery software existed for F2FS at the time was really the concerning factor.