Re: Opinions XFS
On Fri, Aug 03, 2007 at 07:04:44PM -0500, Sam Leon wrote:
> Sergio Belkin wrote:
> >Hi I was reading http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/index.html and was amazed
> >because XFS powerful features. But I'd like opinions if xfs should be a
> >good alternative to ext3 in typical cases, or if it should be relegated to
> >critical missions servers.
> >
>
> From what I have read xfs and jfs can corrupt data quickly if the drive
> is not properly unmounted first (ie, forced reboot, power outage)
>
> People generally stick with ext3 because there is more support for it.
Not this thread again. I went from ext3 to JFS because I have frequent
power failures and Sarge's ext3 would get invisible mysterious errors
that ended up with a corrupted file system, especially if the power
failed during a fsck. At the time, I didn't go with XFS because at that
time there were problems with XFS and loosing data.
I haven't done a recent comparison but both file systems were developed
by their companies to do slightly different things. IBM was focused on
transaction-oriented servers for e-commerce. If the power failed or the
server crashed, they wanted the fsck to go as fast as possible. So the
filesystem will come up quickly in a good state; that some files could
possibly be missing is a good reason for backups. So the notion that
JFS isn't good at unclean shutdowns goes against one of the design
criteria. SGI's XFS was more for compute-oriented boxes (XFS is used in
the new Cray super-computers) and grahpics workstations. The
filesystems can be staggeringly huge and so also need a quick fsck in
the event of power failure. In both cases, down time either during fsck
or fixing of missing or broken files represents real financial burden.
So they're both designed to do basically the same thing from companies
with two different target markets. At any given point, the difference
will be how well Linux handles them; what subset of the features are
implemented. When I chose JFS, XFS had some problems. Based on posts
to recent threads on this topic, I believe that they both work fine now.
As for the features, there was an article in the Linux Gazatte that I'm
looking up now...
http://linuxgazette.net/102/piszcz.html
that does some real-world benchmark comparisons. Its from May, 2004 and
the kernel is a 2.4. However, it may be useful.
Try a google search for 'XFS JFS Linux'
You've got sgi's site for XFS. Here's IBM's JFS site:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-jfs.html
Doug.
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