default file system, was: Comparison to Workstation Technical Specification

[Ric Wheeler]

On 03/01/2014 10:19 PM, Jon wrote:
> 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?

If you use a dm-thin target with a shared storage pool (even if the file system 
is fully backed, i.e. not actually thin), you will get the best case for shrinking.

You can set up say a 1TB file system and only use space that is consumed by the 
actual users of that file system.

When users delete a file, that freed space is returned to the pool and can be 
reassigned to other file systems.

Also keep in mind that shrinking - on any file system - often really messes up 
your data allocation and can have bad performance impacts (on ext3 or ext4).

You can always do better when you tar up your old data, make a new, smaller file 
system and then restore it.

That said, it is not impossible to add shrink to XFS, we just need to bubble 
that up the priority queue of things to do.

thanks!

Ric