Re: [gentoo-user] Re: amd64 installation: which file system?

[Cliff Wells]

On Tue, 2006-07-18 at 18:32 -0700, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> Cliff Wells wrote:
> > I'd be curious who this is well-know to.  The only XFS filesystem I've
> > ever lost (having used XFS exclusively since SGI started offering it on
> > RH 7.?) was due to bad RAM.  There *have* been a couple of issues that
> > I'm aware of, but I'd hardly call it "sucking".
>
> I'm too lazy to search all over the net for xfs "power outage" or "power
> loss", here's a couple of examples:
>
> http://lwn.net/Articles/181355/
> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=1&chap=4#doc_chap4

Sorry, not convinced.  The first is some second-hand quote of Ted T'so
who just *happens* to have a bone to pick with other filesystems.  All
the gentoo article states is some info from the XFS docs about XFS'
"aggressive" caching and potential *data* loss (not FS corruption).
While it's not well-known that XFS sucks in a power outage, it is
well-known that it writes journal before data.  This is a design choice
that helps ensure that while you may lose data in a power outage, you
won't lose your filesystem.  I know no one here seriously thinks that
they won't lose data in a power outage no matter what FS they use so I'm
still unsure how that makes XFS suck.

Bottom line is after 5 years of almost nothing but XFS on many, many
computers (most of them not on UPS), I've had nothing but good fortune
with XFS.  OTOH, I've got a corrupted EXT3 system sitting here I'm
trying to repair for a customer after someone turned it off, and my one
attempt with JFS (when I got my first 64-bit PC) led to almost immediate
disaster.

Bottom line is that if you lose power you risk losing data.  My
experience has been that not only does XFS not fair worse than the other
filesystems, it appears to fair better.

Regards,
Cliff

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