[CentOS] Re: Upgrade RedHat 9 to Fedora -- XFS

[Bryan J. Smith]

sudo Yang <sudoyang at gmail.com> wrote:
> Currently, we use ext3 for all file systems except for the
> DATA partition(s) which is where our critical data lives.

Same for myself.

> The DATA partition(s) hold about 15-20 million files.

Definitely the realm of XFS.

One huge advantage of XFS is its structure.  Like Ext2 (which
Ext3 is based on), it hasn't changed since the mid-'90s.  You
can remove an XFS volume from Linux/x86-64 and bring it up on
Irix/MIPS64, and vice-versa.

There has only been one major bug in XFS.  It caught me on
two of my /var filessytems (I should have been using Ext3
instead, I know better), and was quickly addressed shortly
after I had it (with the XFS 1.1 release).

The reason why XFS wasn't adopted in kernel 2.4 was because
of the massive amount of support required.  The XFS kernel
module was literally over 2MB (took forever to boot if it was
in your initrd on some cards with slow BIOS Int13h disk
services ;-).  That support went in kernel 2.5.3+ (for 2.6),
and was later backported to late 2.4.x releases (circa 2.4.25
I believe?).

It wasn't because of any lack of reliability or stability.  I
sure wish Red Hat would have moved to support it because,
like you, Ext3 is a serious limitation with large
filesystems.

ReiserFS v4 is not your answer.  JFS -- ported from OS/2
instead of AIX (and lacking a lot of features) is definitely
not your answer either.


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