Shows how ahead of its time SGI really was

Posted Feb 21, 2025 1:20 UTC (Fri) by gerdesj (subscriber, #5446)
In reply to: Shows how ahead of its time SGI really was by jmalcolm
Parent article: Filesystem support for block sizes larger than the page size

"but the kernel is only now able to offer all the features that XFS could rely on in IRIX almost 30 years ago."

reflinks?

XFS nowadays has holes in the knees of its jeans, which it mock derides as "ironic". For me XFS is a safe haven for data, especially for large files.

Veeam has supported reflinks for some time now and it is a bit of a game changer when you are dealing with backups that have a full and incrementals. A "synthetic full" can be generated within seconds by shuffling reflinks instead of blocks. Add a flag to cp and you can create a sort of clone within seconds - a bit like a volume snapshot but for individual files.

The real beauty of Linux and other promiscuous Unixes is that we have a lot of choice and sometimes we as sysadmins pick the right one for the job in hand.

Windows has vFAT, NTFS and ReFS and that's your lot. To be fair ReFS is shaping up nicely these days (it doesn't kick your puppies quite so often) and NTFS is very, very stable - regardless of how much you abuse it. vFAT is FAT - keep it simples.

Apples have files and I'm sure they are lovely.