[CentOS] A questiong about replacing my failing drive

[Bryan J. Smith <b.j.smith@ieee.org>]

Alexander Dalloz wrote:
> On the Fedora user list the question came up whether dump & restore are
> extended attributes aware. This is an issue i.e. when using SELinux. Do
> the tools take care?

Since 2002, this is the #1 reason I've been advocating that Red Hat
adopt XFS as its' 2nd, officially supported filesystem.  xfsdump for
XFS does this, and always has.  You don't have to use "getfacl" to
save POSIX ACLs (although that was always an option, even back
in the early 2.4.x days for XFS).

Everything (short of SGI-integrated hardware API support) came over
from Irix in XFS for Linux, and that included POSIX ACLs, Quotas, etc...
This is in stark contrast from IBM JFS which came from OS/2 instead
of AIX (because of the legal issues with Monterey), and ReiserFS is
a non-traditional UNIX design (I won't go there, even if it is very
innovative in most respects).   Most of these features in kernel 2.6 
ere thanx to the SGI XFS team, and the team also worked with the
Ext3 and Linux & co. as of 2.5.3+ in ensuring POSIX EAs were uniform
across all filesystems c/o the VFS.

I haven't wanted to bother Tweedie and/or Red Hat in getting an
explaination why they aren't looking at supporting XFS, but I think
it would solve a lot of scalability issues.  I always assumed it wasn't
merely a "NIH" attitude, and they had real reasons for not wanting
to support it until Ext3 proved to be a serious limitation for them.

Rodrigo Barbosa wrote:
> That depends very much on what you are calling extended attributes.
> I have no experience with SELinux, so I really can't make an
> educated guess on what you are talking about.
> Care to enlight me ?

I have to be honest, I've never used xfsdump and verified SELinux
attributes were preserved.  But it should bring _all_ POSIX EAs with
it.  I've just typically relied on it for ACLs.


--
Bryan J. Smith   mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org