XFS filesystem revisited

[Collins Richey]

On Fri, 21 Nov 2003 06:12:55 -0500 "David A. Bandel" <david at pananix.com> wrote:

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> On Thu, 20 Nov 2003 23:07:28 -0500
> "Brett I. Holcomb" <brettholcomb at charter.net> wrote:
> 
> > I think that the Gentoo people really don't have much experience with
> > XFS at all -they seem to favor ext3.  Yes, on the log - I've seen that
> > when I had to do an xfs_repair and it told me that I needed to mount
> > then umount to get the log data updated.  Once I did that xfs_repair
> > fixed it.  I never want to see another ext2 (and maybe 3 <G>) system.
> > 
> 
> I suspect that there are some Gentoo followers (those that wrote the
> Gentoo XFS nonsense) that follow the OpenMosix lead developer, who also
> seems to have a dislike for XFS.  I've compared patches from XFS and
> OpenMosix (which clash badly) and there's not a lot of difference, but
> there is one or two minor differences (and they really may be major for
> all I know) in the handling of the base disk I/O.  
> 
> I've decided to wait for 2.6, when OpenMosix can no longer ignore XFS --
> well, they can, they can just not develop OpenMosix for 2.6.
> 

Net summary is that almost everyone (except for one or two gentoo developers
and the OpenMosix folks (I, too, am clueless about OM) loves XFS.  When pressed
into a corner, the gentoo developer (who is in the once burned, thrice
shy category) allowed the following.

"The problem is in how XFS caches content and restores metadata but
fills content with null (^@ ) whenever it goes down. We had XFS on our main
distribution server and it fucked us over deeply and badly due to this, by
chewing in most of the data at a point. This was bad enough to warrant the
change. Before that XFS was recommended above others for its performance."

"The means of achieving their throughput increase is to whack around with
the buffecache and the sync code, making it not flush data to disk every
5 seconds or N blocks (as the current, all other FS do)  which -does- in
fact add afurther risk to the files in question."

Enjoy.

-- 
Collins Richey - Denver Area
if you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the 
worries of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.