Ubuntu – What will be the default filesystem in 16.04

16.04defaultfilesystem

Has it been decided what the default filesystem for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS will be? Will it still be ext4?

ext4 is great, but it was already great in ancient Ubuntu 9.10. Ironically, Wikipedia states

In 2008, the principal developer of the ext3 and ext4 file systems,
Theodore Ts'o, stated that although ext4 has improved features, it is
not a major advance, it uses old technology, and is a stop-gap.

It would be nice to get a few new features (ext5?) … like built-in checksums to help detect and reduce bitrot (perhaps with file-by-file compression).

btrfs seems to continue to be around the corner but suffers from narrow adoption; and although Ubuntu has just announced zfs support, I don't think it is targeted to become the default.

Best Answer

If there were any plans to change the default filesystem, they would be part of the blueprints for 16.04. As you can see, the list of blueprints is rather threadbare compared to the those of 15.10 or 14.04, so I guess things haven't really settled yet. So, if there are plans, they aren't "official" yet.

The last time this was discussed in ubuntu-devel was in April 2015. To quote an Ubuntu kernel dev, Colin King:

After a lot of thorough testing over the past several months, I still deem btrfs as experimental quality. There are still issues that can't be easily recovered from, so personally, I don't recommended it quite yet for a default filesystem.

So, in conclusion:

There are no plans to change the default filesystem.