[GRLUG] WMNTUG Windows 7 Meeting

[Raymond McLaughlin]

Bob Kline wrote:
> 
> 
> On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 3:01 PM, Raymond McLaughlin
> 
>     This is why XFS is my filesystem of choice, especially for large
>     volumes. Some folks like to stick with a small ext3 volume for the OS
>     itself, and there are valid reasons for this selection. But for big
>     (>30G) filesystems XFS is really the way to go.
> 
>     Raymond McLaughlin
>      
> 
> Please elaborate.  

First off I should admit to a sort of bias. I have been active in the
Metro Detroit Linux Users Group for over 10 years, MDLUG was started
among SGI employees, and XFS was open sourced to Linux at about that
time. In this context I have to say I started using XFS on the
recommendation of people who know more about it than I do.

> XFS can be checked
> much faster, but  just as thoroughly in
> some sense?

The MUCH faster fsk on XFS is the main attraction. Rarely more than a
few seconds delay at startup. As far a thoroughness, I'm not sure how to
quantify that. I've never lost a filesystem due to a crash. Individual
files sometimes, when a power cord got yanked during a write. There's
really no practical way to avoid that.

>  What are the "valid reasons?"

The main consideration is that, to maintain compatibility with the Irix
implementation, Linux XFS always starts writing the file system in the
first sector of the device it is written to. This makes it incompatible
with installing GRUB (or LILO for that matter) into boot sector of such
an XFS partition. As long as you can install the boot loader elsewhere,
MBR, another partition or another device, then XFS can be used for
boot/root filesystems.

> As in, I don't know  a thing about it, so a
> small word salad about what it is, and its
> virtues and advantages over ext3, would
> be appreciated.

> Hasn't ext4 started to be used in Linux?

Last I heard it was still in beta, but I may have missed an announcement.

> Anyone know what it offers in the way
> of improvements over ext3, and the rest
> of the world of file systems?

No help here.

> Yes, these questions can be about as
> annoying to answer as "how are you?",
> or "What's up?"  But helpful to some of
> us.

No worries.

>     -- Bob

Ray