XFS filesystem revisited

[Brett I. Holcomb]

Collins, I get the feeling that the Gentoo people are not very interested 
in XFS and they don't want us using it - although this doc is better than 
the previous one in which they discourged us from using it.  I think they 
should have the journaling warning on all the journalling systems or none.  
For what it's worth I've used from the very first Gentoo box and it has 
worked well - no loses.  A couple times I've had to recover (due to X 
locking up) I booted to the liveCD and ran xfs_check and xfs_repair if 
necessary.  What Gentoo failed to mention is that xfs_repair tells me if 
there is pending information in the log and that I need to mount and then 
umount the partition.  I do that, the data is committed and xfs_repair 
fixes it.

Collins Richey wrote:

> FYI.
> 
>>From time to time we have threads about the use of various filesystems
>>(usually
> degrades rapidly to "my fs is better than your fs").
> 
> I just happened to be reviewing the current Gentoo Handbook - a work in
> progress, and I noted the following recommendation for XFS (a favorite of
> many on this list).
> 
> 4.i. Creating Filesystems
> 
> ... [ other fs descriptions]
> 
> "XFS is a filesystem with metadata journaling that is fully supported
> under Gentoo Linux's xfs-sources kernel. It comes with a robust
> feature-set and is optimized for scalability. We only recommend using this
> filesystem on Linux systems with high-end SCSI and/or fibre channel
> storage and a uninterruptible power supply. Because XFS aggressively
> caches in-transit data in RAM, improperly designed programs (those that
> don't take proper precautions when writing files to disk and there are
> quite a few of them) can lose a good deal of data if the system goes down
> unexpectedly."
> 
> ... [ other fs desciptions ]
> 
> It is interesting that this recommendation is only present for XFS among
> the journaled filesystem choices.
> 

-- 
Brett I. Holcomb
brettholcomb at R777charter.net
AKA Grunt <><
Registered Linux User #188143
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