Les Mikesell wrote:
Does XFS have any advantages over ext4 for normal users, eg with laptops? I've only seen it touted for machines with enormous disks, 200TB plus.
It is generally better at handling a lot of files - faster creation/deletion when there are a large number in the same directory.
I'm wondering if, for the home user, BackupPC would be a good test of that? Otherwise I can't think of a case where I would have a very large number of files in the same directory.
The only down side for a long time has been on 32bit machines where the RH default 4k kernel stacks were too small.
Do you mean that that is a down side of XFS, or ext4?
Does XFS have the same problems that LVM has if there are disk faults?
You can't really expect any file system to work if the disk underneath is bad. Raid is your friend there.
In my meagre experience, when a disk shows signs of going bad I have been able to copy most of ext3/ext4 disks before compete failure, while LVM disks have been beyond (my) rescue. Actually, this was in the time of SCSI disks, which seemed quite good at giving advance warning of failure.