default file system, was: Comparison to Workstation Technical Specification

[Jon]

The inability to shrink or reduce XFS is rather disappointing. I've
seen a few sarcastic remarks along the lines of (paraphrased): why
would anyone ever want to shrink a volume?

People do shrink volumes, and this lack of flexibility is an important
consideration I feel was ignored in the Server WG decision. for me
personally, I'm not sure any performance gains are enough to
compensate for the lack of flexibility. Considering that LVM has the
ability to resize volumes, ext4 pairs very well, and I'm skeptical
thin provisioning does enough make-up for the lack of XFS shrinking.

I've seen a number of presentations on XFS and I'm personally very
happy about the raw gains in performance and resilience. So in that
respect XFS is a good choice for the Server WG.

So my question to the Server WG, did anybody consider this aspect of
XFS (lack of shrinking) before making the decision? What were the
highest reasons for NOT staying with EXT4?

Thanks,
-Jon Disnard
fas: parasense
irc: masta