Dear XFS folks, I have been using XFS for many years, starting on IRIX and then on RedHat 7.2, and now on CentOS/RHEL and Ubuntu. Last time I posted to this mailing list was 12 years ago. :-) I've been a happy customer! I understand that RedHat does not formally support XFS as a root filesystem on RHEL. However, up until now, I've been using it very successfully for years on both CentOS and Ubuntu. On CentOS, I've successfully patched Anaconda since CentOS 5.6 to allow XFS root file system support directly from Anaconda (on both bare metal and Xen VMs). Prior to that, I had code in %post that would simply migrate an ext3 fs to XFS. And I always run md raid1 (except with Xen, since I use mirroring on the dom0). I never use hardware RAID since I want to keep my provisioning as generic as possible. I've deployed many servers using XFS this way and it has always been superior for my workloads.... and superior to ext3, and ext4. ....until CentOS 5.9 came out. Now any systems that are running the stock CentOS 5.9 kernel (including 5.X systems upgraded to this kernel) hang on reboot. If I downgrade to the 5.8 kernel, the problem is resolved. I have taken an engineering approach to testing this problem in efforts to help resolve it. I filed a bug with CentOS, but it's probably not going to go anywhere upstream since RedHat probably won't support XFS on the root filesystem (why I still don't understand, since I fixed the issues with Anaconda for myself and can Kickstart systems with XFS all day long). Therefore I hope anyone here can help. In fact, I was specifically hoping to catch Eric Sandeen's attention since this seems like a pretty serious regression. It's further aggravated by the fact that RedHat stays behind with kernel version and backports modern fixes. I scanned over the 2.6.18-348.el5 (stock 5.9 kernel) changelog, and I see a few suspicious things, but I'm not sure. Much more detail is available here (CentOS bug id 0006217) including steps to reproduce the problem. Also testing with and without md raid. http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=6217 The one thing I haven't provided is a traceback. I can provide that if it would be helpful. I am not in a big hurry for help, on the contrary I just want to open up a dialog since perhaps others might be suffering from this. And I want to help resolve it if I can. Any insight is appreciated. -- Tom _______________________________________________ xfs mailing list xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx http://oss.sgi.com/mailman/listinfo/xfs
