choosing the best filesystem - FYI

[Chris Miller]

On 10/29/07, Paul <paulvarjak at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello.
>
> I've read some data about filesystem's performance presented by SGI
> engineers in a linux simposium and I would like to share it with you
> because XFS is not much known by "home" users and it's a very stable
> opensource journaled filesystem which has many advantadges.
>
> See the attached JPG for the performance numbers.
>
> If someone wants to get the original information:
> http://www.linuxsymposium.org/2006/proceedings.php
>
> The JPG i send is from page 177 in volume 1.
> Exploring High Bandwidth Filesystems on Large Systems 177
>
> Regards...
> Paul.

Generally ext3 will do you fine.  If you absolutely ***NEED*** the
speed of XFS, chances are that you've already learned enough to be
able to deal with it (grub, I'm looking at YOU).

I've used XFS before, and it's a nice FS, however, it does have some
limitations.  Foremost, it's not grub compatible, and lilo is just
plain weird.  I learned how to use Lilo, however, stick with grub if
you can!

Second XFS is rather old.  New versions aren't being merged into the
kernel until the XFS folks start making mods that adhere to the Linux
Kernel standards (particularly negative error codes, etc).  XFS is
reluctant to do that because it digresses from their IRIX codebase.  I
don't blame them that much, 'cause I personally strolled through that
code to try and do it myself for the LKJ, and was thoroughly confused
in a very short time.

I was also under the impression that XFS is less tolerant of
corruption due to its more sensitive data structure (a B-Tree), though
that could just be me imagining things.

-- 
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