On 13Oct2016 14:29, Gordon Messmer <gordon.messmer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 10/12/2016 03:57 PM, cs@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Except it the wildest scenarios, XFS fsks at mount, almost immediately.
Is that different from fsck.ext4 replaying the journal?
Not fundamentally.
Go and cat (yes, cat) the fsck.xfs command.
OK. I'm not sure what you think I'll learn by doing so.
Only that it is a shell script that handles the typically used boot options,
but doesn't do anything else.
fsck.xfs exists because Linux's "fsck" supports multiple filesystems and
Irix's did not. On Irix, fsck was exclusively for EFS. XFS used xfs_check
and xfs_repair. When XFS was ported to Linux, the tools were not renamed;
instead fsck.xfs was put in place to direct users to the correct tool when
they ran "fsck -t xfs".
And when they really need a repair that the XFS mount process doesn't
accomplish.
None of that makes XFS immune to corruption, nor reduce the time or
the memory required to fix an XFS filesystem if it's damaged.
Of course not, though I have the impression that the repair tool is less memory
intensive than the ext4 equivalent.
"Never" is indeed not _literally_ true, but it is effectively true,
far far far far more than is so with ext4. Ext4 really needs fsck
after an unclean unmount, and it is not cheap for large filesystems.
With journaling and write barriers in place, I don't know any reason
that ext4 would be any more affected by a power loss than XFS would
be, and having had to perform recoveries on both, I don't find one to
be significantly better than the other.
Fair enough. We may be into the realm where a question on an XFS list may be
more illuminating about the modern state of play.
Thus, my advice remains that users should test both because they do
differ in performance in different workloads. If one will be faster
under normal operation, 99.95% of the time, and require slightly more
down time to recover in the other .05% of the time, then selecting the
option which is superior 99.95% of the time is a perfectly rational
thing to do.
That's especially true of backup systems where down time does not
carry the same impact as down time in a production system does.
The two are like night and day in the recovery scenario (== xfs
pretty much never needs manual recovery, and recover is very fast).
That seems subjective. I've personally had to recover more XFS
filesystems than I have ext4 filesystems, and I use ext4 filesystems more
often. My subjective experience is quite different than yours.
Apparently so. I've had very good experiences with XFS, and plan to stick with
it at present.
Out of interest, how recent was your need to recover XFS, and what were the
circumstances that caused it to be necessary?
Cheers,
Cameron Simpson <cs@xxxxxxxxxx>
_______________________________________________
users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
