[ale] XFS on Linux - Is it ready for prime time?

Michael Trausch mike at trausch.us
Wed Apr 21 23:09:53 EDT 2010


On Wed, 2010-04-21 at 21:34 -0400, Doug McNash wrote:
> I'm consulting at a company that wants to turn their Linux based NAS
> in to a reliable product.  They initially chose XFS because they were
> under the impression that it was high performance but what they got
> was something of questionable reliability. I have identified and
> patched several serious bugs (2.6.29) and I have a feeling there are
> more unidentified ones out there. Furthermore, xfs_check craps out of
> memory every time so we have to do an xfs_repair at boot and it takes
> forever.  But today we got into a situation where xfs_repair can't
> repair the disk (a raid5 array btw).
> 
> Does anyone out there use xfs? How about a suggestion for a stable
> replacement. 

The last time I tried XFS, I lost a veritable fsckload of data (ha, ha).

I have been using the ext[2|3|4] family for years with solid
reliability.  I've never lost data from it that wasn't directly
attributable to some hardware failure.

ext4 has been really good for me, too.  btrfs has been faster in my
testing, but it's not yet reliable enough to trust my data to on a
permanent basis---I have not yet lost data with it, but I have managed
to crash the filesystem driver a few times with situations that I would
expect to be fairly common (the most recent of which was a btrfs on two
devices and with multiple subvolumes).  So for now, my personal
experience says to go with ext4 until btrfs is fully cook^Wbak^Wsautéed.

	--- Mike

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