As of Linux 2.6 (and late 2.4.25+ kernels?), all of the core support structures that XFS needs are now standard. Other than one bug in XFS 1.0 (fixed some 3 years ago, resulting in the XFS 1.1 release), XFS has been rock-solid and reliable for me. The only major thing that had to change from Irix to Linux was the default block size (to match the default paging of the x86 architecture from MIPS).
Unfortunately, Red Hat didn't want to support XFS, and so it is disabled in their Enterprise kernels (and thus Centos 4). I'm a big fan of XFS (5.5TB of formatted space online, another 5.5 soon to go into production), and so I've had to recompiled the Centos kernel to enable it.
I've understood that XFS is a great filesystem and would like to use it for our 2 file servers. As I'm new to linux administration, I was planning to purchase SUSE to have the XFS filesystem supported for these two machines. But, I really like the Centos distro and community. So, I'm wondering, how hard would it be for me to get this working and to maintain it. Is it complicated to recompile the Centos 4 kernel to enable it? And, what sort of upkeep is necessary as updates become available? I'd appreciate any general and specific information on what's involved to get XFS enabled on Centos 4.
Thanks! Allison