XFS file system

[George N. White III]

On Sat, 24 Dec 2005, don fisher wrote:

> I can determine that the XFS file system is supported. But it does not appear 
> to be mainstream (e.g. no mkfs.xfs etc). Abut two years ago it was used for 
> large (>4TB) and fast file systems.

And is still used for things like numerical simulations, rendering, and 
remote sensing invlving terrabyte's of data where downtime is expensive 
and thruput is important.  XFS tries to ensure that the filesystem is 
always consistent, so rebooting a huge after a crash does not require 
running fsck for days before the system can be used.

> What is the current status of XFS. Most all of the documentation I have been 
> able to locate date from the last century.

Maybe you were looking at docs on RH systems. There is an active mailing 
list.  SGI (who still support XFS as an open source project) has begun 
using SUSE on their Itanium machines, so XFS is certainly being used by
the people who really need it.

There can be problems with XFS, especially if you get into edgy 
workloads/hardware configurations, on 32-bit Intel (depending on the 
devices) with the 4-k stacks on RH.  Most people who really need XFS will 
be using 64-bit processors.  Some people have been running XFS on 32-bit 
hardware in FC[34] without problems, but I suspect they have been lucky 
with the workloads and hardware.

-- 
George N. White III  <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>