On Wed, 2005-11-09 at 06:43 -0800, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> Joe Landman <landman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > xfs is in the Centosplus repository. On the
> > "enterprise class" if you mean "Redhat derived" then
> > you have a point. However, SuSE and most of the other
> > major distributions have native xfs support (and have had
> > it for years).
>
> XFS working correctly an completely is another matter
> entirely. It was much better back in the days when SGI
> officially released XFS for select Red Hat Linux releases for
> kernel 2.4. The XFS support in the stock kernel has always
> been suspect (especially the 2.4 backport).
>
> As someone who has been on the XFS lists over the last 5+
> years, especially early on, SGI only supported XFS in its
> official releases (for Red Hat Linux). There was always
> massive breakage in various distros. SuSE is no exception
> (and don't get me started on Mandrake ;-).
>
> E.g., SuSE has never been known for their attention to NFS
> compatibility. At one point in 2000, one SuSE engineer said
> I was much better off with Ext3 on Red Hat than ReiserFS on
> SuSE. Every now and then the Red Hat v. SuSE debate comes up
> on the XFS list and you'll quickly note people who have had
> nightmares with XFS on SuSE's distros.
>
> > Redhat is rather alone in this regard, and this may be
> > due to all their investment in ext3.
>
> Or the fact that Red Hat actually supports what it ships.
> SuSE has bit me in the @$$ too many times on NFS (let alone
> other distros). If you don't need NFS services, great! If
> you do, I would deter you from anything but Red Hat (or Sun
> ;-) in a distribution release.
>
> At the same time, I agree that the lack of Red Hat interest
> in XFS is rather troubling. Especially the insistence that
> Ext3 can do everything XFS -- and those statements go silent
> when I start talking about everything from storing EAs in
> dumps to scalability to defragmentation. I documented that
> in my past blog entry here:
> http://thebs413.blogspot.com/2005/08/filesystem-fundamentals-and-practices.html
>
> But there are some real issues with XFS on 4K stack kernels
> and NFS compatibility right now. And I don't trust XFS in
> kernel 2.4, period (except for the older releases).
The 4k stack problem are a major issue with XFS. I am working with
someone at SGI to get some better code for our unsupported kernel, but
that cods still has 4k stack issues.
I tried, very unsuccessfully, to get a RH patched 2.6.9-22.0.1 kernel to
compile with 8K stacks.
To be honest, I would not use XFS in the CentOS kernel on a mission
critical server.
The code we will roll in from SGI will be similar to the latest release
on SuSE, but (as I said) that has 4k stack issues too.
I am sorry to say, ext3 is just the best and most stable bet.
The kernel in CentOS plus will run XFS, ReiserFS, and JFS ... but only
ext2/ext3 are really rated as production stable (or the others would be
in the standard kernel).
>
> If you're going to run any XFS kernel, I recommend you pull a
> stable-tag'd version of the kernel out of XFS' CVS
> repository. How compatible/able it is with FC/RHEL/CentOS, I
> just don't know. But trying to add in patches for other
> things is not a nightmare I want to deal with. ;->
>
>
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