[CentOS] XFS and CentOS 4.3

Tue Aug 15 13:15:33 UTC 2006
Joshua Baker-LePain <jlb17 at duke.edu>

On Tue, 15 Aug 2006 at 4:18am, Johnny Hughes wrote

> Personally, I would not use xfs on Linux ... maybe take a look here:

Almost every time I've tested performance for my workload of interest, XFS 
kicks the $#@)$ out of ext3 -- we're talking more than 2X write 
performance on the same hardware.  And every time I point out how poorly 
ext3 performs (either on the RH lists or the ext3 list) I get ignored or 
told it's my hardware (despite also providing the XFS numbers proving it's 
not the hardware).

And I won't even go into xfsdump vs. ext2/3 dump.

> http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20060814
>
> And see what several debain devel's say about XFS.

Yes, there was a bad bug with XFS recently.  It's fixed now.  It happens.

> RedHat says it is not stable enough to use in RHEL.

I've never completely understood RH's opposition to XFS.  I've heard 
several stories -- the 4K stacks issue (which is a long way towards being 
resolved in recent kernels), support issues, etc.  I almost wonder if it 
isn't a case of NIH.

> I don't think everyone can be wrong.

To add one more anecdotal data point, I've used XFS since RH7.3 (using 
pre 1.0 releases from SGI) and never lost *any* data to it.  Transitioning 
to ext3 (to stay with officially supported kernels) was *painful* -- 
performance plummeted, and it forced me to rework many of my servers.

> If you really want to use it, you can use the module you referenced
> above and our kernel.  The standard RHEL kernel will not compile w/
> anything except 4k stacks (that is how the CentOS kernel is released
> too) ... so if you want to do that, you'll need to figure it out.

Also (to the OP) keep in mind that x86_64 still uses 8K stacks.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University