Server Distros

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, Dec 24, 2002 at 12:40:22PM -0700, Collins wrote:
>On Tue, 24 Dec 2002 10:40:06 -0800 Bill Campbell <bill at celestial.com>
>wrote:
>> On Tue, Dec 24, 2002 at 09:05:51AM -0800, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
>> >I'm thinking to go the same way; I already have RH 7.3, but until
>> >now I haven't been paying much attention to XFS.  How do you get
>> >that installed?  Is there a step-by-step?
>> 
>> All the things I've heard about XFS make it sound like the greatest
>> thing since sliced bread, but when I was looking at the gentoo site
>> yesterday, it had some strong recommendations against using it, and
>> recommended reiserfs for systems with many small files.
>> 
>
>I'm curious which specific gentoo document you are referring to? 
>Gentoo has offered xfs kernels for a long time.  It is true that
>reiserfs generally has a slight performance edge for small files. 
>OTOH, I've been using EXT3 without any complaints (survived several
>lockups with flying colors) for a year now.  I also used XFS and
>reiserfs for a few months without incident.  

I think it was in the installation instructions.  I had started
with a reference to the SGI site, then followed their links of
systems that support XFS in the distribitions to gentoo.  My next
step was to start looking to see what's necessary to install it.
	http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-install.xml

Looking at this, I find statements like:

  ``XFS is a filesystem with metadata journaling that is fully supported
  under Gentoo Linux's xfs-sources kernel, but be warned that it is highly
  unstable at this time.''

  ``Please be careful with XFS; this filesystem has a tendency to fry lots
  of data if the system crashes or you lose power. Originally, it seemed
  like a promising filesystem but it now appears that this tendency to lose
  data is a major achilles' heel.''

>I can't argue with the fact the XFS comes from a long, successful
>commercial background.  My personal preference is to wait for formal
>adoption in the kernel (2.6), since I don't need the additional hassle
>of dealing with patches outside the main kernel tree.

My feelings exactly.

We've been using ext3 for a while, after having some very bad experiences
with reiserfs a year or so ago on my laptop.  The gentoo site has some very
positive remarks about Reiser now, so I may reconsider that, at least for
my development machines which tend to lots of relatively small files.

Bill
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