Default boot/root filesystem

[William Brown]

On Mon, 2013-09-09 at 11:02 -0500, Eric Sandeen wrote:
> On 9/9/13 10:56 AM, Till Maas wrote:
> > On Sat, Sep 07, 2013 at 05:35:05PM -0500, Eric Sandeen wrote:
> > 
> >> If people want to switch the Fedora default to XFS, I'll gladly file
> >> the feature.  :)
> > 
> > Why is XFS better than ext4. When I checked a few months ago, XFS did
> > not even support shrinking, but only growing. Even now there seems to be
> > only xfs_growfs on F19, but no tool to shrink it.
> 
> There is no universal "better" so I won't argue that point.  TBH,
> ext4 is probably more performant for the most common types of
> machines, storage, and workloads under typical Fedora </handwave>.
> 
> XFS really shines as things get bigger - bigger storage, more cpus,
> more memory, more spindles.
> 
> As for shrink, you are right - there is no xfs shrink.
> 
> (OTOH, I have seen a fair bit of damage done by ext4 shrink, so I'm
> not so sure lack of shrink should count *against* xfs) ;)


http://lwn.net/Articles/476263/

This is a good read, and so is the talk by Dave Chinner about XFS.

XFS in the past was slower than ext4, but now it's quite a bit faster on
most workloads. I'm running it on fedora atm as my root/boot fs (efi)

I would certainly like to see XFS as the default as it's a fast, simple
file system that just does it's job. 

Additionally, with the concerns re device shrink. Yes, XFS won't let you
shrink, but with thin provision LVM that isn't so much an issue: You
just shrink the pv and leave it alone. I would also argue that anyone
who is smart enough to shrink their devices, is smart enough to lookup a
little bit about lvm thinp.

I think a really good feature that would go alongside this, would be
discards by default so that lvm thinp can relinquish free blocks also.
But that's really another topic :)



-- 
Sincerely,

William Brown

pgp.mit.edu
http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=vindex&search=0x3C0AC6DAB2F928A2


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 876 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20130925/08a02702/attachment.sig>