Why XFS

Motto: quoting xfs whitepaper from 1996 usenix conference: With today's 9 gigabyte disk drives it only takes 112 disk drives to surpass 1 terabyte of storage capacity (emphasis mine). http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/papers/xfs_usenix/index.html

XFS: eXtended File System (SGI, Unix, Windows)

What are 'journaled filesystems': filesystems with journal.

    Good:
  1. Old and very well-tested: shipping since 1994
  2. Very good performance on large IOS
  3. Fully 64bit filesystem, has no problem with large files and discs, very well tested ( literaly decades ) with terabyte-range files and filesystems.
  4. Security: damaged files gets zeroed...
  5. Native quota
  6. Native acl
  7. Native EAs
    Bad:
  1. Relatively new to linux. But still - oldest journaling filesystem available on Linux
  2. Slow on small files ( with 1-2k sized files even ext2 is way faster)
  3. Convenience: damaged files gets zeroed... supposedly this is the issue with all journaling filesystems
  4. Not very popular - issues with exotic software: quotes inside virtual servers, etc..
  5. Not very simple codebase, stable and well-tested, but very big and relatively intrusive. (non-issue on 2.6, where lots of needed support was moved to lower layers, things like variable-size IO requests, delayed allocation )
  6. Takes few % more of diskspace then others, it bit me when I tried to convert partition that was 99% full...
  7. On related note - xfs is very slow when filesystem is 99.x% full,
  8. No data=journal
  9. You can't use it in raid1 both driectly on hardware and via md1

See more ...

| Why XFS | | 2004.05.03-21:07.00

Running with VPNs...

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| Running with VPNs... | | 2004.02.17-15:09.00

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