Reviewing has become a nightmare of sifting through under-documented kernel code trying to decide if this new feature won't break all the other features. Getting reviews is an unpleasant process of negotiating with demands for further cleanups, trying to figure out if a review comment is based in experience or unfamiliarity, and wondering if the silence means anything.Damn I feel that
Darrick nominated Chandan Babu of Oracle to handle release management for XFS
Oracle? 🤨 Oh boy…
As much as I despise Oracle and the lawn mower man known as Larry Ellison, I don’t think this is a problem. Oracle also had a lot to do with btrfs, and while that filesystem has problems, they’re not the sort of problems usually associated with Oracle (i.e. rapacious capitalistic practices like patent trolling and suing the fuck out of everyone all the time always). Oracle won’t own XFS, it’s owned by every single person who has ever contributed to that codebase.
Serious question: why would anyone opt for XFS these days? I remember reading about it being faster/more efficient with small files, but is that still valid?
XFS is rock solid and still has active development going on, so why not.
But are there benefits over ext4 and BTRFS these days?
From the top of my head, compared to ext4: RAM use and the ability to shrink an FS if necessary. Oh, also I’ve used an EXT FS driver on a Windows host, but I’ve never seen one for XFS.
Just to clarify, the previous comment asked about benefits of XFS over ext4. But I completely agree with your reasons for choosing ext4.
Oh, my bad.
The two benefits to XFS that I’ve ever seen are that it has no inode limit like ext4 (which prevents the FS shrink). The other is that it seems to handle simultaneous I/O better than ext4 does; think very active database volumes and datastores.
Rock solid may be a stretch. They still suffer from outrageous metadata bugs even to this day when used in busy file systems.
That bug alone has been open for over a decade. Development focus of the people who understand and want to fix those things have shifted to other filesystems like ext4 and ZFS.
Main reason I stopped using it ten years ago.
XFS has been the default file system for RHEL since RHEL 7. A lot of places typically roll with defaults there, so it makes sense to see it still widely used.
The RHEL (and Fedora) defaults are quite good, too.
I’ll give you one reason it’s used commercially: Veeam can only use xfs or refs as a deduplication enabled store using fastclone. For example I have a 60 disk nas hosting hundreds of customer backups and a petabyte. Without deduplication imagine how many extra petabytes of storage would be consumed. Each backup is basically the same image as well as the backup processing time.
Maybe they’ll get that same feature on zfs one day.
Unless you want me to use refs? But I have tried that, and I’ve lost a whole volume to iscsi volume mounted to windows and formatted refs due to corruption when a network power loss happened gradually and whatever reason, that network interruption caused the whole volume to be unmountable over iscsi ever again. I’m not keen to retry that.
Xfs is pretty good with 60 disks, I wouldn’t trust ext4 with that many but there’s nothing factual about ext4 but a feeling.
About to get a second 60 disk nas for another datacentre for the same setup as above to migrate away from Wasabi as offsite. Will build xfs again. Looking forward to it.
