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XFS is not for the massesXFS is not for the massesPosted Apr 26, 2006 13:11 UTC (Wed) by hmh (subscriber, #3838)In reply to: Filesystems (ext3, reiser, xfs, jfs) comparison on Debian Etch (Debian Administration) by dwheeler Parent article: Filesystems (ext3, reiser, xfs, jfs) comparison on Debian Etch (Debian Administration)
XFS' data loss on powerloss scenarios is still true. It is caused by (as others said) the fact that data writes are not protected unless you call fsync(), and I am not really sure they are fully protected even then.
What people often forget is that XFS has delayed write allocation, which increases the window for such data loss even more as a trade-off for performance. Given that making sure that XFS isn't corrupted requires xfs_repair and is not easy to do on the / partition on most default installs, I would never recommend anyone who doesn't really know what he is doing to use it (and yes, XFS does get corrupted although it is a very rare event, and usually due to bad memory on the system board).
Ext3 will also have corruption/data loss issues on powerloss, depending on your disks and their caches, but the window is much smaller. At least it is very fsck-on-boot-friendly...
Maybe the new SATA drives (which seem to be better at honouring cache flush requests) and IO barriers will put an end to most ext3 corruption on the typical desktop, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
I won't comment on reiserfs, I have little experience with it.
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XFS is not for the masses Posted Apr 26, 2006 21:43 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] Ah well, with early userspace it's easy to fsck before mounting /, and when early userspace lands for everyone, hopefully there'll be a fsck in there, or klibc will be capable enough for e2fsprogs's fsck...
XFS is not for the masses Posted Apr 26, 2006 21:54 UTC (Wed) by hmh (subscriber, #3838) [Link] You can fsck / with ext2/ext3 just fine. It is XFS' utter useless fsck semanthics (do nothing) which are trouble. You need xfs_repair in the early/repair userland to deal with that.
I'd be much better if XFS' (and anyone else also doing this) would just stop with the impress-the-management-with-lies politics and implement fsck as it is meant to be implemented, instead of as a NOP.
XFS is not for the masses Posted Apr 27, 2006 6:23 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] Why not wrap up xfs_repair with a fsck wrapper? (I thought someone had done that, actually.)
XFS is not for the masses Posted Apr 27, 2006 12:02 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] There is something unpleasant about fscking *any* live filesystem to me: the 'recommend reboot' return code from e2fsck is a symptom of this unpleasant special case. Well, now we can zap it :)
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