Hi folks... trying to pick between jfs and xfs for a filesystem. In the past we've used jfs with CentOS + centosplus, however, an older post indicated that this may not be the best choice as the version of jfs included with the centosplus kernel would only be as new as the version that was included in the 2.6.18 kernel as RH doesn't backport fixes...
It looks like xfs isn't part of the centosplus kernel, but instead is provided as a kmod -- so I'm thinking it might be the better choice based purely on the fact that it's likely to be current. Is my understanding correct there?
What would stop us from building a kmod-jfs against the latest jfs from the up-upstream kernel and not building jfs.ko in the centosplus kernel at all? It looks like jfsutils is a fairly recent version...
Thanks, Ray
Ray Van Dolson wrote:
Hi folks... trying to pick between jfs and xfs for a filesystem. In the past we've used jfs with CentOS + centosplus, however, ...
CentOS and its upstream source, RHEL, support ex3fs. I'm not sure why you'd want to use anything else. If you have a specific requirement for JFS, I'd suggest running a BSD or AIX system where JFS is native... If you need XFS, I'd run a Linux distribution that supports it natively.
If you roll your own hybrid operating system, you get to test and validate it, and if it breaks, you get to keep both pieces.
On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 10:46:00PM -0800, John R Pierce wrote:
Ray Van Dolson wrote:
Hi folks... trying to pick between jfs and xfs for a filesystem. In the past we've used jfs with CentOS + centosplus, however, ...
CentOS and its upstream source, RHEL, support ex3fs. I'm not sure why you'd want to use anything else. If you have a specific requirement for JFS, I'd suggest running a BSD or AIX system where JFS is native... If you need XFS, I'd run a Linux distribution that supports it natively.
If you roll your own hybrid operating system, you get to test and validate it, and if it breaks, you get to keep both pieces.
Thanks for the reply John. However, my question wasn't so much "if I should" but how the xfs support in CentOS compares to jfs. It seems to me that xfs is a bit more up-to-date.
If you'd like, consider the question academic vs giving me a recommendation that pushes me down the path of unsupported filesystem doom. :-)
Ray
On Wed, Nov 19, 2008, Ray Van Dolson wrote:
On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 10:46:00PM -0800, John R Pierce wrote:
Ray Van Dolson wrote:
Hi folks... trying to pick between jfs and xfs for a filesystem. In the past we've used jfs with CentOS + centosplus, however, ...
CentOS and its upstream source, RHEL, support ex3fs. I'm not sure why you'd want to use anything else. If you have a specific requirement for JFS, I'd suggest running a BSD or AIX system where JFS is native... If you need XFS, I'd run a Linux distribution that supports it natively.
If you roll your own hybrid operating system, you get to test and validate it, and if it breaks, you get to keep both pieces.
Thanks for the reply John. However, my question wasn't so much "if I should" but how the xfs support in CentOS compares to jfs. It seems to me that xfs is a bit more up-to-date.
I have not tried either of these on CentOS, but have on SuSE Enterprise Linux. I have lost data on both jfs and xfs on SuSE so now use ext3 for everything as it's the only file system that has never bitten me in the butt.
Bill
Ray Van Dolson wrote:
On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 10:46:00PM -0800, John R Pierce wrote:
Ray Van Dolson wrote:
Hi folks... trying to pick between jfs and xfs for a filesystem. In the past we've used jfs with CentOS + centosplus, however, ...
CentOS and its upstream source, RHEL, support ex3fs. I'm not sure why you'd want to use anything else. If you have a specific requirement for JFS, I'd suggest running a BSD or AIX system where JFS is native... If you need XFS, I'd run a Linux distribution that supports it natively.
If you roll your own hybrid operating system, you get to test and validate it, and if it breaks, you get to keep both pieces.
Thanks for the reply John. However, my question wasn't so much "if I should" but how the xfs support in CentOS compares to jfs. It seems to me that xfs is a bit more up-to-date.
If you'd like, consider the question academic vs giving me a recommendation that pushes me down the path of unsupported filesystem doom. :-)
I've been using XFS on centos for a couple of years with no problems. Only minor annoyance was when the kmod for new kernels was slow to appear, but thats not a problem any more due to the non kernel version dependant kmods.
Dunc
On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 1:55 AM, Ray Van Dolson rayvd@bludgeon.org wrote:
Thanks for the reply John. However, my question wasn't so much "if I should" but how the xfs support in CentOS compares to jfs. It seems to me that xfs is a bit more up-to-date.
Which one to use seems to come down to what you're using that particular filesystem for. I'm using xfs with CentOS 5.2 on one of my system's non-root filesystem. Seems to work well. I haven't used jfs on CentOS in a while, but not for any of the reasons you've listed.
2008/11/20 Ray Van Dolson rayvd@bludgeon.org:
Thanks for the reply John. However, my question wasn't so much "if I should" but how the xfs support in CentOS compares to jfs. It seems to me that xfs is a bit more up-to-date.
If you'd like, consider the question academic vs giving me a recommendation that pushes me down the path of unsupported filesystem doom. :-)
Outside more up-to-date question, here is my own experience with jfs/xfs. The bigger the files with JFS, the slower it is. XFS tends to get similar performance, whatever the filesize is. I've had data corruption with both. The thing is, I don't know where it comes from with JFS, with XFS *do* *not* *ever* run a box without an UPS. Unclean shutdown will always eat some of your data. I've been happy with ext3 (no data corruption ever happened) but its speed is behind the first two. Hope this helps, Laurent
On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 3:34 AM, Laurent Wandrebeck l.wandrebeck@gmail.com wrote:
Outside more up-to-date question, here is my own experience with jfs/xfs. The bigger the files with JFS, the slower it is. XFS tends to get similar performance, whatever the filesize is. I've had data corruption with both. The thing is, I don't know where it comes from with JFS, with XFS *do* *not* *ever* run a box without an UPS. Unclean shutdown will always eat some of your data. I've been happy with ext3 (no data corruption ever happened) but its speed is behind the first two.
Supposedly ext3 has sped up with the 2.6 kernels.
http://linuxgazette.net/122/piszcz.html
The only thing I don't like about ext3 is the fsck. On relatively small filesystems, it's an annoyance. But on huge filesystem, 500-1000GB, a system may take a long, long time to come back up.
On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 11:03 AM, Karanbir Singh mail-lists@karan.org wrote:
Jiann-Ming Su wrote:
The only thing I don't like about ext3 is the fsck. On relatively small filesystems, it's an annoyance. But on huge filesystem, 500-1000GB, a system may take a long, long time to come back up.
if you dont want it, turn it off :D
It probably does the default checks for good reason.
Jiann-Ming Su wrote:
On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 3:34 AM, Laurent Wandrebeck l.wandrebeck@gmail.com wrote:
Outside more up-to-date question, here is my own experience with jfs/xfs.
. . .
The only thing I don't like about ext3 is the fsck. On relatively small filesystems, it's an annoyance. But on huge filesystem, 500-1000GB, a system may take a long, long time to come back up.
If you use ext3 on lvm, you can do a background fsck.
http://markmail.org/message/5ipnsva3xkdyzzfy
on 11-20-2008 8:22 AM Toby Bluhm spake the following:
Jiann-Ming Su wrote:
On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 3:34 AM, Laurent Wandrebeck l.wandrebeck@gmail.com wrote:
Outside more up-to-date question, here is my own experience with jfs/xfs.
. . .
The only thing I don't like about ext3 is the fsck. On relatively small filesystems, it's an annoyance. But on huge filesystem, 500-1000GB, a system may take a long, long time to come back up.
If you use ext3 on lvm, you can do a background fsck.
Now that is interesting. I will have to experiment with that one.
I have several large systems that sooner or later will need to FSCK. In the past I would schedule a fsck on reboot over a long holiday, and hope no one needed anything, or set up another synced copy for that time. It takes a lot of planning, and careful re-syncing if something changed.
Toby Bluhm <> scribbled on Thursday, November 20, 2008 5:23 PM:
If you use ext3 on lvm, you can do a background fsck.
Nice, thx for the hint!
Jiann-Ming Su <> scribbled on Thursday, November 20, 2008 4:59 PM:
The only thing I don't like about ext3 is the fsck. On relatively small filesystems, it's an annoyance. But on huge filesystem, 500-1000GB, a system may take a long, long time to come back up.
Even on smaller 200GB-systems this takes annoyingly long time, but I see the need why one would occasionally want to run this anyway. Last time I rebooted one of our servers to get a new kernel loaded, I was told at boot that it'd been some 400days or so since the last fsck. After such a long time you might want to do the forced check anyway, just in case. It's for your own good. 8-)
Ray Van Dolson wrote:
Thanks for the reply John. However, my question wasn't so much "if I should" but how the xfs support in CentOS compares to jfs. It seems to me that xfs is a bit more up-to-date.
Couple of points from my side of the line:
I use xfs, i dont use jfs. but only on x86_64
xfs in centos has eyeball attention from some people who are and previously have been involved with xfs upstream ( sgi )
xfs in CentOS is more widely used than jfs is in centos ( impression I get from looking at logs on and off - generated at mirror.centos.org ).
Having said all this, I know atleast 1 person who is indeed running jfs at the moment with CentOS5. And I am sure there are usecase's where Jfs is a better option than Xfs.
Does this help answer the question ?
- KB
Karanbir Singh wrote:
Couple of points from my side of the line:
I use xfs, i dont use jfs. but only on x86_64
xfs in centos has eyeball attention from some people who are and previously have been involved with xfs upstream ( sgi )
xfs in CentOS is more widely used than jfs is in centos ( impression I get from looking at logs on and off - generated at mirror.centos.org ).
Having said all this, I know atleast 1 person who is indeed running jfs at the moment with CentOS5. And I am sure there are usecase's where Jfs is a better option than Xfs.
Does this help answer the question ?
Well said. You are very zippy too after rolling out those kernel updates what brand of coffee do you take? :-)
Regards, Vandaman.
Vandaman <> scribbled on Thursday, November 20, 2008 5:31 PM:
And I am sure there are usecase's where Jfs is a better option than Xfs.
Does this help answer the question ?
So which fs is preferred when, any rule of thumb one should know of? Pointers gratefully accepted.
TIA.
Sorin Srbu wrote:
Vandaman <> scribbled on Thursday, November 20, 2008 5:31 PM:
And I am sure there are usecase's where Jfs is a better option than Xfs.
Does this help answer the question ?
So which fs is preferred when, any rule of thumb one should know of? Pointers gratefully accepted.
There's never a single really good answer for your type of question. You need to assess *your* needs against the various file systems available.
I don't know how up-to-date this is kept, but it seems to be a good place to start off by comparing features:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems
Performance - you should be able to find something more current, but I believe the basic trends are still true:
Just repeating what's already been said - ext3 is the default on Centos. xfs support is contributor added. Support for other file systems seems to drop off quickly - you may be able to get there, but it will take more work on your part - which may also affect how updates are handled - especially kernel updates.
Personally, in years past, I've toyed with xfs, jfs and reiserfs3. xfs & reiserfs always felt twitchy to me. I liked jfs, but stayed with ext3 for production. Couldn't shrink jfs, if I recall correctly, which was important to me. I've never been burned by ext3. It's there - it works. I've never had a real need for anything beyond ext3's capabilities. Normal precautions like backups, UPS, etc. go a long way to ensure piece of mind.
Also, if it turns out ext4 is the cat's meow, I expect there to be a trivial upgrade from ext3.
Sorin Srbu wrote:
Vandaman <> scribbled on Thursday, November 20, 2008 5:31 PM:
And I am sure there are usecase's where Jfs is a better option than Xfs.
Does this help answer the question ?
So which fs is preferred when, any rule of thumb one should know of? Pointers gratefully accepted.
the fact that you are asking this question would indicate, to me, that you dont need either of these. You should be sticking with ext3 as shipped in the stock distro.
Karanbir Singh <> scribbled on Friday, November 21, 2008 3:50 PM:
Vandaman <> scribbled on Thursday, November 20, 2008 5:31 PM:
And I am sure there are usecase's where Jfs is a better option than Xfs.
Does this help answer the question ?
So which fs is preferred when, any rule of thumb one should know of? Pointers gratefully accepted.
the fact that you are asking this question would indicate, to me, that you dont need either of these. You should be sticking with ext3 as shipped in the stock distro.
The KISS-rule applies in my case, I know. 8-) Just thought I'd check with you guys if there's something else than the default ext3 one should look into.
A friend of mine running mythtv, swears by ReiserFS, or if it was xfs, can't recall exactly. Anyway, one of those fs's is supposedly better with large files than ext3 is. That's what got me asking.
You're right though, the best all-round solution is ext3. Like Toby said earlier, it's there and it works.
Thanks for the feedback.
On Fri, 21 Nov 2008, Sorin Srbu wrote:
So which fs is preferred when, any rule of thumb one should know of? Pointers gratefully accepted.
TIA.
A good rule of thumb, for me anyways, is don't mess with the stock distro unless you absolutely need to, otherwise you're just asking for trouble. When the decision was made by the USP not to support all these file systems it was for good reason. In *most* cases EXT3 works just fine.
In my case it doesn't (medical imaging data/big data) and so I use XFS. I'm ready to troubleshoot it myself if need be though.
On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 12:36 AM, Sorin Srbu sorin.srbu@orgfarm.uu.se wrote:
Vandaman <> scribbled on Thursday, November 20, 2008 5:31 PM:
And I am sure there are usecase's where Jfs is a better option than Xfs.
Does this help answer the question ?
So which fs is preferred when, any rule of thumb one should know of? Pointers gratefully accepted.
There are too many factors involved to make a generic, rule-of-thumb decision on this. Among other things, your particular hardware setup may have a lot to do with it.
When I was working at Datallegro, we were looking at these two for two major reasons: one is that they reputedly handle huge files better than other file systems, the other that they handle huge i/os to large files better than o.f.s. (For us, then, a 5TB database was tiny, and our i/os routinely ran into multiple GB per i/o. We were balancing cached vs direct i/o, elevator algorithms, compressed vs. uncompressed, and all the other architectural factors that came together at the performance bottleneck.)
However, we had complications because we were using fiber-channel storage and the xfs support (or version) wasn't so good, so we wound up using jfs as an interim solution solely because its performance and reliability over the fiber channel was better than anything else we tried. We also had specific needs w.r.t. compression capability and need for long sequential writes to files and a host of other conditions.
So, your situation is the real determining factor. If it's important enough to your place of employment, do a study to see what works best for you and go with that. Otherwise, I'd say just stick with ext3 as long as that works for you.
HTH.
mhr
MHR <> scribbled on Friday, November 21, 2008 7:01 PM:
So, your situation is the real determining factor. If it's important enough to your place of employment, do a study to see what works best for you and go with that. Otherwise, I'd say just stick with ext3 as long as that works for you.
No, no, this is directed purely at home use. I've been playing around with MythTV a bit, which usually sooner or later means big files-handling. Ext3 is not that good at that.
At work, I wouldn't dream of exchanging ext3 in favour of anything else on our *nix servers and workstations. Ext3 is there and just works (good enough).
2008/11/25 Sorin Srbu sorin.srbu@orgfarm.uu.se:
MHR <> scribbled on Friday, November 21, 2008 7:01 PM:
So, your situation is the real determining factor. If it's important enough to your place of employment, do a study to see what works best for you and go with that. Otherwise, I'd say just stick with ext3 as long as that works for you.
No, no, this is directed purely at home use. I've been playing around with MythTV a bit, which usually sooner or later means big files-handling. Ext3 is not that good at that.
I used "to swear" by ReiserFS for a few years on my home desktop, including through a few power failure, until one day I tried to shrink it and lost all data.
I now stick to ext3. It's good enough for anything I need on my desktop, it doesn't require extra hoops to jump through in order to install (I think Debian installer supports it but I don't use Debian any more) and I feel comfortable enough to play with it.
Cheers,
--Amos
On Thu, 2008-11-20 at 12:21 +0000, Karanbir Singh wrote:
I use xfs, i dont use jfs. but only on x86_64
Ditto.
xfs in CentOS is more widely used than jfs is in centos ( impression I get from looking at logs on and off - generated at mirror.centos.org ).
(much snippage) - over on the mythtv list, you'll find that there are more than a few people (including myself) that have been using XFS with CentOS for *years* without problems. XFS is better than ext3 when dealing with files in the sizes of hundreds of megs and possible a couple dozen gigs... (deleting a 60GB file on ext3 takes a *while*...)
That being said, RH doesn't support XFS and would rather one used ext3. But this is CentOS. We have -plus here, and kmods for those who want to use it... remember - it's all GPL...
-I
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Amos Shapira -
Bill Campbell -
Dunc -
Ian Forde -
James A. Peltier -
Jiann-Ming Su -
John R Pierce -
Karanbir Singh -
Laurent Wandrebeck -
MHR -
Ray Van Dolson -
Scott Silva -
Sorin Srbu -
Toby Bluhm -
Vandaman