On Wednesday 25 May 2005 15:45, Dave Jones wrote: > On Wed, May 25, 2005 at 03:38:22PM -0700, David Kewley wrote: > > Can anyone here provide experience reports or pointers to reports, > > regarding the safety of Linux's write support for Sun UFS? It is > > marked as experimental and dangerous, but it appears to have been > > around since 1998. I'm wondering whether this might be one of > > those things that works fine but still carries old labels. > > It doesn't get any real attention upstream, so I've no particular > belief that its gotten any more stable than it ever was (wrt writes). > For this reason, the write support is disabled in Fedora. > > > I have several external RAID arrays that up to now have been > > attached to Sun boxes and formatted with UFS filesystems. I will > > be attaching these arrays now to a RHEL 4 host. > > UFS is also unavailable in RHEL4. > > > If I can safely get away with it, I'd prefer to keep writing to > > the UFS volumes since we're talking about several TB of data. > > I certainly wouldn't trust it with data I wanted to keep. > > > then I will need to transfer the data to a Linux filesystem with > > spare TB of space, reformat the external filesystems, and move the > > data back (or variations on that plan). These are filesystems > > that several people use for daily work, so I'd rather avoid the > > copy time if possible. > > This is unfortunatly, probably the best way forward. Thanks *very* much, Dave -- it's good to hear this from someone highly involved in the kernel. I'll take your advice. I am using UFS and XFS in RHEL4 by rebuilding the kernel with those filesystems enabled. The filesystems appear to work fine; I know others are also using XFS in RHEL4. I've just now for the first time mounted that Sun UFS volume with this kernel. I was able to do the one thing I tried -- 'ls' the top-level directory. :) I had enabled write support in the kernel and mounted it rw; I'm now going back & re-building that kernel without write support, per your advice. I could mount ro, but that's not as safe as disabling writes. I know that using these filesystems on RHEL4 is neither supported nor recommended by Red Hat. As an academic site-license customer, however, I don't get RH support anyway, so I get to make my own choices appropriate to my risk tolerance. ;) David -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
