[rescue] Linux FSs

[Andrew Gaylard]

On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 12:12 PM, Michael-John Turner <mj at mjturner.net>wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 04, 2008 at 07:37:39PM -0500, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> > For my money, JFS is the way to go on Linux right now.  ext2/ext3 are
> > stablew but slow and antiquated; ReiserFS has always been of suspect
> > reliability, and has horribly high CPU utilization for delete
> > operations; XFS, as previously noted, is not fully supported on Linux.
> > The rest are pretty much bit players (so to speak).
>
> Commenting on this purely from a support perspective, the one thing that is
> a huge plus for me is that XFS has a very active development team. I came
> across a minor issue a few months ago and had a patch within hours.
>
> This is purely hearsay, but I remember reading a comment from someone who'd
> contacted IBM and been told that they only had one developer currently
> working on JFS.
>
> FWIW, I currently use XFS for everything but /boot on my Linux systems.
>
> -mj


Having had an O2 with IRIX on my desk for 4 years until 2003,
I came to love XFS.  Until this year, I've used it happily on all
my Linux boxes, with the /boot exception.  (I haven't found a
boot loader that can read XFS.  How did IRIX do it?)

However, I've had two serious issues this year, which I never
got to the bottom of, but which went away when I moved to
ext3.

The first was repeatable NFS hangs from a variety of Linux &
Solaris clients when the exported filesystem was XFS.

The second was occasional rsync hangs when writing to a XFS
filesystem (we use rsync for backups, 100G per day).

These don't mean that XFS is the culprit, but I'm now nervous.
I still use it myself, but if someone asks which filesystem they
should choose, it's no longer the automatic answer.

Andrew