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Ext4 to be standard for Fedora 11, Btrfs also included (heise online)Ext4 to be standard for Fedora 11, Btrfs also included (heise online)Posted Jan 25, 2009 19:29 UTC (Sun) by Nelson (subscriber, #21712)In reply to: Ext4 to be standard for Fedora 11, Btrfs also included (heise online) by drag Parent article: Ext4 to be standard for Fedora 11, Btrfs also included (heise online) I think the data safety claims are spurious at best, XFS is a serious filesystem with serious developers, made by a serious company. There simply aren't semantics for UNIX defined for what is supposed to happen when you lose power mid-write. My experience, they are both par. All the stories seem to be anecdotal, and the fact of the matter is whatever filesystem you're running when you lose data is going to become a defacto POS in your mind after that. The big difference between the ext(x) family and XFS and JFS is ext(x) seem to be supported, really well. The others are still kind of bolt-ons to various distributions. I ran an all XFS Mandrake/Mandriva and Fedora systems for years, you'd be shocked how many times you'd' install a kernel upgrade and have a non-bootable system. I got to the point I'd never even consider doing a full distribution upgrade. The situation might be better now but for a very long time it looked like just a handful of kernel devs so much as cared about XFS, let alone enhanced it and kept it fresh with the rest of the kernel.
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Ext4 to be standard for Fedora 11, Btrfs also included (heise online) Posted Jan 25, 2009 20:35 UTC (Sun) by cantsin (guest, #4420) [Link] What doesn't seem to be anecdotal is that XFS caches data more aggressively and over longer time in RAM than other filesystems including ext3. This results in performance advantages, but reliability issues on any other but high quality server hardware with ECC RAM. The anecdotal evidence mostly comes from users running PCs with standard (cheap) RAM and in non-data center-/USV-usage scenarios where loss of power is more likely or even common (such as on laptops).
Ext4 to be standard for Fedora 11, Btrfs also included (heise online) Posted Jan 25, 2009 20:39 UTC (Sun) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
I have to object - laptops have statistically more batteries than desktop computers :-)
Ext4 to be standard for Fedora 11, Btrfs also included (heise online) Posted Jan 26, 2009 2:25 UTC (Mon) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link]
But, in countries with relatively stable electricity supplies, laptops are more likely than desktops to be uncleanly shut down because the battery ran out.
Ext4 to be standard for Fedora 11, Btrfs also included (heise online) Posted Jan 25, 2009 23:56 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
UNIX doesn't define semantics for what happens when you lose power
mid-write. That means that what a filesystem does when that happens is a quality-of-implementation issue: but given that power supplies are not perfectly reliable it's a fairly important one, especially in countries like the USA with a third-world electricity distribution network (as a UK resident I'm privileged to have a fairly reliable power supply and the most badass electrical regulations on earth: it's one of the few things the UK's done right infrastructure-wise).
However, I'm afraid I consider 'files you were writing right now might be
I too saw this behaviour when I used XFS (years ago now): I've never seen
Ext4 to be standard for Fedora 11, Btrfs also included (heise online) Posted Jan 26, 2009 23:44 UTC (Mon) by lmb (subscriber, #39048) [Link]
Unix/POSIX doesn't define what happens to data in when you crash "mid-write", but it has one hell of an opinion on writes that have been committed and where the write()/fsync()/... calls have returned. So the durable state of the data is quite defined, unless the application is too dumb to make proper use of those features. (And, of course, unless the fs bites the dust.)
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