Allison Maury wrote on 09 May 2005 13:20:
(Sadly the following quote's attribution is lost)
>> Unfortunately, Red Hat didn't want to support XFS, and so it is
>> disabled in their Enterprise kernels (and thus Centos 4). I'm a big
>> fan of XFS (5.5TB of formatted space online, another 5.5 soon to go
>> into production), and so I've had to recompiled the Centos kernel to
>> enable it.
Ironic since that the post-production and film VFX world virtually run on
XFS due to throwback to the SGI days, and there can be literally anywhere
from hundreds to thousands of Linux installs (mainly Red Hat) with XFS on
renderfarms and workstations. Needless to say, we've got work arounds for
XFS installs, but it's still a bit of a pain in the bum nonetheless.
> I've understood that XFS is a great filesystem and would like to use
> it for our 2 file servers. As I'm new to linux administration, I was
> planning to purchase SUSE to have the XFS filesystem supported for
> these two machines. But, I really like the Centos distro and
> community. So, I'm wondering, how hard would it be for me to get
> this working and to maintain it. Is it complicated to recompile the
> Centos 4 kernel to enable it? And, what sort of upkeep is necessary
> as updates become available? I'd appreciate any general and specific
> information on what's involved to get XFS enabled on Centos 4.
Oh, it is a lovely filesystem. This site:
http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/
will give you all the info you need on it. As for enabling it in CentOS, I
really can't remember if this is possible through a switch on the LILO
command line when installing. I don't think anybody has come up with a
dedicated CentOS XFS supported installer..
The alternative would be to do a normal ext2 format and install and then
convert to XFS later (see SGI site above).
Regards,
Martyn
