Xfs vs ext4 - can I mix them?

Rocky Linux General
1

Hi,

I don’t like the fact that a xfs file system cannot have is size reduced in any way.
Will I be in the wrong if recreate /home as ext4 ?
I’m used to have filesystems like /data and /opt and resize them as needed.

2

You can use ext4 if you want. It’s there as an option to use instead of xfs. And yes, you can have a Linux system that has some ext4, or ext2, or xfs, or whatever as a filesystem. There’s nothing to stop you mixing either.

On my system:

[root@elise ian]# mount | grep ext
/dev/nvme1n1p3 on / type ext4 (rw,noatime)
/dev/nvme1n1p2 on /boot type ext4 (rw,noatime)

[root@elise ian]# mount | grep xfs
/dev/nvme0n1p2 on /data type xfs (rw,noatime,attr2,inode64,logbufs=8,logbsize=32k,noquota)
3

Thanks for your feedback.
I was kind of surprised when I find out that Rocky was using xfs (and probably recent versions of RHEL but I haven’t used it in recent years).
I had the idea that in Linux xfs was only used on systems like NAS’es where there was need to store extra metadata / user info / permissions.

4

RHEL 5 had ext3 as default.
RHEL 6 had ext4 as default and XFS for volumes over 16 TB.
RHEL 7–9 have XFS as default. Almost a decade by now.

I do use ext4 almost everywhere.