Quoting Sergio Belkin <sebelk@gmail.com>:
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.
XFS is a rock solid filesystem. So is EXT3. XFS generally will be faster than EXT3, but only for medium to large files. EXT3 is faster with really small files around 1K or so. Depending on your needs, you may want to benchmark the 2 filesystems to compare. Bonnie++ is a nice tool to use, as it lets you change the test file sizes around.
XFS and grub do not work nicely together, therefore you'll need /boot mounted with EXT3, everything else can be XFS, even / .
XFS can destroy files, but its more of myth when people say it will just magically destroy files. XFS is designed this way as its a meta-data only journalling filesystem. Bottom line, is that only recently written files, within 60 seconds of write, will get hosed if your system suddenly loses power. Therefore, if you use XFS, use a UPS, of which will auto halt your box in case of power loss. Use good hardware, and of course, have good backups. Also, use smartmontools to monitor your drives. Its not 100% perfect against failing drives, but its better than nothing.
I would not recommend XFS for a workstation environment where its your system drive. Why? Only because you might have to hard reboot it every once in awhile. Perhaps for storing media type files on a seperate filesystem though.
I'm quite impressed with the stability and performance of XFS and having been using it for over a year on production servers that run mail, file and web serving. (x86_64 etch)
Cheers,