ufs write safety

[Dave Jones]

On Wed, May 25, 2005 at 03:38:22PM -0700, David Kewley wrote:
 
 > Can anyone here provide experience reports or pointers to reports, 
 > regarding the safety of Linux's write support for Sun UFS?  It is 
 > marked as experimental and dangerous, but it appears to have been 
 > around since 1998.  I'm wondering whether this might be one of those 
 > things that works fine but still carries old labels.

It doesn't get any real attention upstream, so I've no particular
belief that its gotten any more stable than it ever was (wrt writes).
For this reason, the write support is disabled in Fedora.

 > I have several external RAID arrays that up to now have been attached to 
 > Sun boxes and formatted with UFS filesystems.  I will be attaching 
 > these arrays now to a RHEL 4 host.

UFS is also unavailable in RHEL4.

 > If I can safely get away with it,  I'd prefer to keep writing to the UFS volumes
 > since we're talking  about several TB of data.

I certainly wouldn't trust it with data I wanted to keep.

 > then I will need to transfer the data to a Linux filesystem with 
 > spare TB of space, reformat the external filesystems, and move the data 
 > back (or variations on that plan).  These are filesystems that several 
 > people use for daily work, so I'd rather avoid the copy time if 
 > possible.
 
This is unfortunatly, probably the best way forward.

		Dave