default file system, was: Comparison to Workstation Technical Specification

[Ian Malone]

On 1 March 2014 18:57, Simo Sorce <simo at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 2014-03-01 at 12:04 +0000, Ian Malone wrote:
>> On 28 February 2014 20:45, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
>> > On Thu, 2014-02-27 at 23:16 -0700, Chris Murphy wrote:

>> As you say they are 'plain' filesystems. Though I now regret not
>> sending my small datapoint in before the Server WG decision. That's
>> that a while ago, after using XFS for a long time we started putting
>> new filesystems onto ext4 and in the past month we moved probably our
>> largest remaining dataset (1.1TB) from XFS to ext4, the main reason
>> has been flexibility with resizing. Particularly the XFS 32bit inode
>> ceiling, (inode64 not working well with NFS).
>> 1TB doesn't sound very big. These are imaging datasets in a research
>> environment, files going from small text to images at tens of MB (some
>> bigger, but not the dominant type). Projects usually get their own FS
>> (for a variety of reasons including backup, audit and budgeting
>> reasons). And often it's not known how large a project will eventually
>> be, so filesystems get extended as appropriate. With XFS we have to
>> take care to avoid the 32bit inode ceiling, and most recently found a
>> filesystem that refused to take any more files for some other reason,
>> even after creating a new clean copy. We didn't get to the bottom of
>> that, and moved the data to ext4.

> As far as I know inode64 is not really a problem on NFS anymore, which
> is why I did not raise this as an issue at all (I use NFS and I have a
> 6TB XFS filesystem with inode64).
>

Unless you have legacy systems that must talk to it. And the other
problem I mentioned, which we didn't solve, but didn't seem to be
inode64 (copy data onto a new fs of sufficient size and it should be
difficult to hit the 32bit limit). That machine is running an older
kernel, I'm not saying there's a particular problem with going with
XFS for server, what I should have said was it's probably the wrong
way round to have the server FS decision dictate the desktop one,
which seems to be what's going to happen.

-- 
imalone
http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk