[1]Linux 6.17 is an interesting time to carry out fresh file-system benchmarks given that [2]EXT4 has seen some scalability improvements while [3]Bcachefs in the mainline kernel is now in a frozen state . Linux 6.17 is also what's powering Fedora 43 and Ubuntu 25.10 out-of-the-box to make such a comparison even more interesting. Today's article is looking at the out-of-the-box performance of EXT4, Btrfs, F2FS, XFS, Bcachefs and then OpenZFS too.

[4]

Due to the mentioned motivating factors, recently I carried out some fresh Linux file-system benchmarks on the Linux 6.17 development kernel. All of the file-systems were tested from a Crucial T705 1TB PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD (CT1000T705SSD3). Ubuntu 25.10 in its daily form was used for testing with its Linux 6.17.0-4-generic kernel as of testing. As Ubuntu 25.10 also patched an OpenZFS build to work on Linux 6.17, I included that out-of-tree file-system too for this comparison. So tested for this article were:

- Bcachefs

- Btrfs

- EXT4

- F2FS

- OpenZFS

- XFS

[5]

Bcachefs was tested in its upstream Linux 6.17 state. [6]Bcachefs is working to roll-out DKMS out-of-tree kernel modules moving forward. The Bcachefs DKMS performance will be evaluated in a separate article when available.

Each file-system was tested with its default mount options and running a range of benchmarks to see how these different Linux file-systems are competing.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Linux+6.17

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-617-ext4

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Bcachefs-Externally-Maintained

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=linux-617-filesystems&image=linux_617_ssd_lrg

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=linux-617-filesystems&image=linux_617_fs_lrg

[6] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Bcachefs-DKMS-Plans