Feizhou wrote:
XFS has degraded over time. Some tend to say that XFS was in its best form around 2.4.18 - 2.4.22 and I tend to concur since I know of a box using XFS version 1.1 for 2.4.20 that proved to be very stable and handled directories with hundreds of thousands of files on a daily basis. XFS that comes with newer kernels get my view below.
If you want to say that it is rock-solid in the sense that it does not crash I will disagree with you. I have seen many occasion on which XFS shuts itself down and a reboot is required to get the shutdown filesystem up and running again. If you want to say that it is rock-solid in the sense that it survives power outage or crashes intact I will only agree on the count of file system integrity but not on data integrity. No contest on XFS' performance. Hard to beat it except for large deletes.
Furthermore, certain kernel developers have been vocal about not wanting to have anything to do with XFS code due to its complexity and other reasons. XFS is also not supported with a 4K stack. Nasty things happen. Since RHEL (save AMD64 kernels) use 4k stacks, it is not surprising that Redhat has withdrawn official support for XFS on RHEL4.
If you are going to create an installer that supports XFS, please make sure that the kernels involved all use 8k stacks. How you are going to do that after installation, I do not know. I wonder whether the centos plus kernels for Centos 4 use 8k stacks...
Thanks for you explanation; it has been very clear. Now, I know the reasons why Anaconda doesn't support XFS by default.