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On 7/20/06, Cliff Wells <cliff@×××××××.com> wrote: |
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> As a more useful bit of info than anecdotes and scaremongering, here's a |
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> decent article that covers XFS in fair detail and compares a few of its |
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> major differences from the other journaled filesystems: |
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> |
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> http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-fs9.html |
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Posting links to articles written by Gentoo's founder is cheating! :-) |
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But in fact, Daniel didn't really address the real-world reliability |
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of the filesystems. He addressed it theoretically, and only in |
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relation to reiserfs, not ext3. But in fact I disagree with one |
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assertion that Daniel makes: |
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"but writing metadata more frequently does encourage data to be |
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written more frequently as well" |
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In it's default configuration, XFS avoids writing data out to disk |
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until it absolutely has to, or a *significant* amount of time has |
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elapsed. Only by tweaking /proc settings have I gotten it to flush |
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out data in a reasonable amount of time. |
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Are you seriously telling me that in all the years you have run XFS |
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filesystems, you have never seen /var/log/messages get padded with |
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nuls? That is the kind of "corruption" that XFS is well known for. |
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(BTW, I _know_ this is a security feature. But the fact is that ext3 |
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users pretty much _never_ see this kind of data, um, "security"). It |
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may be great at maintaining it's own consistency, but it seems |
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particularly predatory to the files contained within it. I've already |
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mentioned a recent corruption I had with XFS on one of my systems... |
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Besides, every time this discussion has come up here, the majority of |
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particpants have agreed that ext3 is the least likely to corrupt data. |
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Don't get me wrong. I like XFS, and I am running it on my laptop and |
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desktop systems. However I have tweaked the settings so that it |
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behaves like I want, and am very cautious about just hitting the |
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reset/power button when I get a lockup. I have learned that the hard |
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way. |
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And my "bottom line" is: if someone came here and asked "what is the |
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most reliable filesystem", my answer would be ext3. Hands down. |
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-Richard |
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-- |
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