Joe Landman landman@scalableinformatics.com 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.h...
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).
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. ;->