Jordi Espasa Clofent wrote:

James Pearson wrote:

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The installer (anaconda) supports the boot command line option 'xfs' - however, the installer needs the XFS kernel module (or XFS built in) and access to the xfsprogs package - neither of which the CentOS installer has ...

You can always rebuild the installer with these, but this is non-trivial ...

Curious. XFS (IMHO) is a good and rock-solid filesystem, especially in production boxes. I think it's odd that Anaconda doesn't include it. ¿Is there some HOWTO or article which explains how make it?

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 Since RHEL (save AMD64 kernels) use 4k stacks, it is not surprising that Redhat has withdrawn official support for XFS on RHEL4.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...

On Friday 24 November 2006 08:56, Feizhou wrote: ...

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...

plus or not, i386 is 4k and x86_64 is 8k.

/Peter

On Fri, 2006-11-24 at 19:40 +0800, Feizhou wrote:

Peter Kjellstrom wrote:

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On Friday 24 November 2006 08:56, Feizhou wrote: ...

...

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...

plus or not, i386 is 4k and x86_64 is 8k.

Yeh! So there should only be XFS rpms allowed for x86_64. Unless of course the plus kernels for i386/i686 is configured to use 8k stacks.

There is a warning about 4k stacks when installing the XFS modules.

I can not get the i686 kernels to compile when moving to 8k stacks (with the other normal items turned on). I did not spend a huge amount of time on it, but if someone can turn on 8k stacks on i686 and get a stable, usable kernel for xfs, maybe we can publish it somewhere and build an installer for it.

I do not necessarily recommend XFS ... but we do make it available.

I would say that if you really want to use XFS, do so on an x86_64 installed distro only.

Also, it is not too hard to create an ext3 boot/root partition and create XFS partitions later to mount as /var, /home, data partitions, etc.

I don't think I would ever recommend that you put /boot or / on an XFS partition ... but that's just me.

Thanks, Johnny Hughes