Ext4 to be standard for Fedora 11, Btrfs also included (heise online) [LWN.net]

Ext4 to be standard for Fedora 11, Btrfs also included (heise online)

Posted Jan 23, 2009 4:10 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313)
In reply to: Ext4 to be standard for Fedora 11, Btrfs also included (heise online) by giggls
Parent article: Ext4 to be standard for Fedora 11, Btrfs also included (heise online)

to those saying that ext3 is so much faster than XFS, is this with ext3 disabling barriers (as it does by default in the name of performance) while XFS honors them?

to those who say ext3 is so much safer than XFS, are you taking the absense of barriers into account?

(Log in to post comments)

Barriers, shmarriers...

Posted Jan 23, 2009 10:15 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

to those who say ext3 is so much safer than XFS, are you taking the absense of barriers into account?

Nope. Why should I? I'm not talking about internals or some theory. I'm talking about practice. When files untouched for months are corrupted after energency power switch (this was the case with XFS for many, many years) - this is reason enough to stop using it. It never happened for me with ext3, it happended few times with xfs (when I've tried to actually use it): power down your system at some random point (I did this not on purpose: power in my home sometimes was switched off), check iа your MP3 collection is still Ok (it's not - most files are Ok and have the same sha1sum, but few are destryed) and start reripping stuff from CDs. And if files untouched for months (Ok, they were played, but never modified) were randomly corrupt - how can I trust this filesystem? What can I put on it?

Ok, may be this mysterious spring 2007 fix solved this problem - but by then I've stopped caring about XFS and don't have guts to go back and check again. It works in lab tests, it does not work in real life - that's the problem...

Barriers, shmarriers...

Posted Jan 25, 2009 11:19 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Right, barriers are only a means for an end; as our kind editor told us some time ago corruption is not very likely except in contrived tests, and in practice few people have ever seen it. OTOH it seems that all XFS users have seen corrupted data on a power off, and it hurts. So in a way yes, we are taking the absence of barriers into account.