Since everybody seems to be having fun building new filesystems these
days, I thought I should join the party. Tux3 is the spiritual and
moral successor of Tux2, the most famous filesystem that was never
released.

When it comes to file systems, Linux® is the Swiss Army knife of operating systems. Linux supports a large number of file systems, from journaling to clustering to cryptographic. Linux is a wonderful platform for using standard and more exotic file systems and also for developing file systems.

When you say "log-structured file system," most storage developers will immediately think of Ousterhout and Rosenblum's classic paper, The Design and Implementation of a Log-structured File System - and the nearly two decades of subsequent work attempting to solve the nasty segment cleaner problem (see below) that came with it.

ext3 and ext4 file systems can be converted to btrfs. For non-root file systems, this can be done online (i.e., without reboot), while for root file systems we need to boot into some kind of rescue system or Live CD. This guide explains how to convert an ext3 or ext4 root file system into btrfs on Ubuntu 12.10 and how to roll back to ext3/ext4 again if desired.

Prior to the emergence of Btrfs as a viable next-generation Linux file-system, Sun's ZFS file-system was sought after for Linux due to its advanced feature-set and capabilities compared to EXT3 and other open-source file-systems at the time.

The patches adopted in Linux 2.6.30 introduce many significant changes affecting data security and Ext3 and Ext4 performance. Support for the EXOFS and NILFS2 file systems is new, as is the cache for the AFS and NFS network file systems. There are also a few fixes for the almost forgotten ReiserFS file system.

File-system benchmarks have become quite common to Phoronix in the age of EXT4 and Btrfs with these new file-systems driving much of the interest and as we have also been finding the Linux file-system performance to change between kernel releases. This time around we are using a Git snapshot of the Linux 2.6.34 kernel.

With support for over 50 file systems, excluding user space implementations, GNU/Linux has been extremely successful at supporting file system innovation.

One of the questions that's been thrown at me of late is "When should I take up a new file system?" To explain this a little farther, the user is asking more or less how soon they should adopt one of the newer file systems in place of the older.