[CentOS] Is ext4 safe for a production server?

Tue Dec 8 12:56:45 UTC 2009
Timo Schoeler <timo.schoeler at riscworks.net>

thus Chan Chung Hang Christopher spake:
> Timo Schoeler wrote:
>> thus Christopher Chan spake:
>>   
>>> Ian Forde wrote:
>>>     
>>>> On Dec 7, 2009, at 10:30 AM, Florin Andrei <florin at andrei.myip.org>  
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>       
>>>>> John R Pierce wrote:
>>>>>         
>>>>>> I've always avoided XFS because A) it wsan't supported natively in  
>>>>>> RHEL
>>>>>> anyways, and B) I've heard far too many stories about catastrophic  
>>>>>> loss
>>>>>> problems and day long FSCK sessions after power failures [1] or what
>>>>>> have you
>>>>>>           
>>>>> I've both heard about and experienced first-hand data loss (pretty
>>>>> severe actually, some incidents pretty recent) with XFS after power
>>>>> failure. It used to be great for performance (not so great now that  
>>>>> Ext4
>>>>> is on the rise), but reliability was never its strong point. The  
>>>>> bias on
>>>>> this list is surprising and unjustified.
>>>>>         
>>>> Given that I stated my experience with XFS, and my rationale for using  
>>>> it in *my* production environment, I take exception to your calling  
>>>> said experience unjustified.
>>>>
>>>>       
>>> The thing is that none of you ever stated how XFS was used. With 
>>> hardware raid or software raid or lvm or memory disk...
>>>     
>> Speaking for me (on Linux systems) on top of LVM on top of md. On IRIX 
>> as it was intended.
>>
>>   
> 
> That is a disaster combination for XFS even now.

(Not company critical stuff -- just my 2nd workstation, the one to mess 
around with; however, I didn't have problems yet -- what, of course, 
should nobody invite do test it [on critical data]...!)

> You mentioned some 
> pretty hefty hardware in your other post...

Which do you mean?

Timo