[CentOS] Filers, filesystems, etc.

Wed Nov 9 14:43:28 UTC 2005
Bryan J. Smith <thebs413 at earthlink.net>

Joe Landman <landman at scalableinformatics.com> wrote:
> xfs is in the Centosplus repository.   On the
> "enterprise class" if you mean "Redhat derived" then
> you have a point.  However, SuSE and most of the other
> major distributions have native xfs support (and have had 
> it for years).

XFS working correctly an completely is another matter
entirely.  It was much better back in the days when SGI
officially released XFS for select Red Hat Linux releases for
kernel 2.4.  The XFS support in the stock kernel has always
been suspect (especially the 2.4 backport).

As someone who has been on the XFS lists over the last 5+
years, especially early on, SGI only supported XFS in its
official releases (for Red Hat Linux).  There was always
massive breakage in various distros.  SuSE is no exception
(and don't get me started on Mandrake ;-).

E.g., SuSE has never been known for their attention to NFS
compatibility.  At one point in 2000, one SuSE engineer said
I was much better off with Ext3 on Red Hat than ReiserFS on
SuSE.  Every now and then the Red Hat v. SuSE debate comes up
on the XFS list and you'll quickly note people who have had
nightmares with XFS on SuSE's distros.

> Redhat is rather alone in this regard, and this may be 
> due to all their investment in ext3.

Or the fact that Red Hat actually supports what it ships. 
SuSE has bit me in the @$$ too many times on NFS (let alone
other distros).  If you don't need NFS services, great!  If
you do, I would deter you from anything but Red Hat (or Sun
;-) in a distribution release.

At the same time, I agree that the lack of Red Hat interest
in XFS is rather troubling.  Especially the insistence that
Ext3 can do everything XFS -- and those statements go silent
when I start talking about everything from storing EAs in
dumps to scalability to defragmentation.  I documented that
in my past blog entry here:  
http://thebs413.blogspot.com/2005/08/filesystem-fundamentals-and-practices.html

But there are some real issues with XFS on 4K stack kernels
and NFS compatibility right now.  And I don't trust XFS in
kernel 2.4, period (except for the older releases).

If you're going to run any XFS kernel, I recommend you pull a
stable-tag'd version of the kernel out of XFS' CVS
repository.  How compatible/able it is with FC/RHEL/CentOS, I
just don't know.  But trying to add in patches for other
things is not a nightmare I want to deal with.  ;->


-- 
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