Most Appropriate log-structured file system to use with Linux / SSD?

With the development of log-structured filesystems and the introduction of (relatively) inexpensive SSDs, is there a best choice for a log-structured filesystem for use on Linux with SSD drives?

Solution 1:

NILFS2 has been merged into the current development kernel, and will be available in kernel 2.6.30 (You can run a -rc kernel if you're impatient). It apparently performs very well on SSDs.

As with anything recently merged into the kernel, you'll have to make your own decision regarding stability and maturity.

Solution 2:

It seems to be that the answer is to use a filesystem you would use with normal disk.

Linus seems to second this idea.

See Theodore Ts'o 's article regarding this.

In his other blog entry he writes how to align to ssd's erase block size.

It seems to me that modern SSD's are smart enougth that you should not care. My choice of filesystem is XFS btw.

There are two mount options: relatime, noatime which can be used to reduce disk writes at the expense of modified posix semantics. Reduced disk writes are considered as a good idea with SSD's Theodore Ts'o made some bechmarks regarding the issue.

Solution 3:

I have seen it suggested that the journalling of ext3 is neither desirable (imposes extra writes) nor particularly useful (writes are fast anyway) on Flash drives, and that thus ext2 is to be preferred of the two.