XFS filesystem revisited

[Net Llama!]

On Mon, 24 Nov 2003, Collins Richey wrote:
> 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."

My opinion of gentoo has hit an all time low.  That bug was stomped out
well over a year ago.  And in reality, it never was a bug, it was a
configurable parameter.  So gentoo apparently doesn't read documentation,
and then poisons their userbase with their ignornace.  lovely.

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lonni J Friedman				netllama at linux-sxs.org
Linux Step-by-step & TyGeMo		     http://netllama.ipfox.com