I’m shopping for a new NVMe SSD drive for my laptop and with the second deciding factor being Linux compatibility, I’d looked up the names of specific drives in the source code of Linux and discovered that their controllers have quirks that have to be worked around.

Now, I figured out more or less how quirks affecting one of the controllers impact its functionality under Linux, but there’s another controller that I have a trouble understanding how disabling the aforementioned command limits the functionality of, if at all; therefore I’d like to ask you all, under what circumstances is the command used by a host and can disabling it lower the performance or power efficiency of an impacted controller/drive?

To be clear, the quirk workaround I’m talking a about is NVME_QUIRK_DISABLE_WRITE_ZEROES.

  • Yote.zipEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    XFS doesn’t support snapshots, but it does support reflinking like BTRFS. Reflinks allow data to be shared fully or partially between two files, which means that technically with a lot of elbow grease you could probably write a snapshotting system for XFS built on reflinks. There’s actually a “filesystem” named Stratis that takes vanilla XFS and layers a ton of modern features from e.g. BTRFS/ZFS onto it. Unfortunately it’s not as fast as XFS because of these features so it’s not a silver bullet yet.

    tl;dr, BTRFS’s features are useful for most users, and I wouldn’t worry about filesystem speed unless you’ve got a very specific usecase like a database.