[microtonal]

Did log-structured filesystems really take off for mainstream computing? IIRC they suffered from write amplification and required garbage collection.

Journaling did take off in a big way, with NTFS, HFS+, ext3, etc. supporting it. This mostly removed the long fsck on most modern operating systems.

Of course, traditional filesystems + journaling are now rapidly being replaced by CoW filesystems.

[cryptonector]

ZFS is effectively log-structured. It's what the BSD 4.4 LFS wanted to be. In many ways the two are remarkably similar. ZFS merely solved the problems that had been left unsolved (like garbage collection / free space management), dropped the "all the blocks in a transaction must be contiguous" part, added the ZIL for speed, added a notion of volumes that contain multiple datasets, and reified snapshots.

Log-structured and CoW are very closely related.

[bombcar]

My personal recollection is that long FSCK times on ever-increasing disk sizes was the driving force; I remember switching to ReiserFS simply because my 160 GB mp3 drive would take forever to FSCK if the computer lost power or had to do a hard reset. I didn't even mind the amusing file corruption you'd get from tail-packing or whatever it was because I needed that speed.

I later manually did the needful to get XFS working as it was faster on deletes, iirc.

[5e92cb50239222b]

Depends on your definition of mainstream computing. Samsung's f2fs has been in the linux kernel for many years and is used on their Android devices. It can be used on desktop or server SSDs and gives impressive results on some workloads compared to more traditional ones like ext4, but I've been steering clear of it because at least in 2019 it had really bad error detection (just silently discarding most i/o errors, not something you'd want in a filesystem):

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/atc19-jaffer.pdf

It may have improved since then, who knows.