[CentOS] XFS in Druid

Fri Nov 24 07:56:33 UTC 2006
Feizhou <feizhou at graffiti.net>

Jordi Espasa Clofent wrote:
> James Pearson wrote:
>> 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Redhat has withdrawn official support for XFS on RHEL4.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...