
XFS: The Enterprise File System of Choice - mariuz
https://www.suse.com/communities/conversations/xfs-the-file-system-of-choice/
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mdk754
Could we add a "(2013)" to the title?

Also, can anyone speak to the current state of affairs with respect to ext4,
xfs, and btrfs? I'd love to hear about the tooling and code quality in these
file systems from an informed (and recent) point of view. Has Redhat been
putting out fires since the switch? Did it go unnoticed? Are there measurable
performance and/or reliability gains?

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StillBored
XFS would be perfect if there was a way to disable delayed allocation. Has
that changed recently? I still use it on a number of machines because it tends
to work better with large volumes. But that hasn't kept me from losing data
with it, repeatedly. Of course I've lost data with lots of other linux file
systems too, so in that regard it isn't much worse. These days if I really
think the data is important I still use a bunch of little ext3 partitions with
data=journal, barrier=1 and all the disk caches set to write through mode.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allocate-on-
flush](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allocate-on-flush)

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poelzi
xfs is my first choice for data loss. Poweroff in suspend and the root fs was
bricked, twice. Never ever again.

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mdk754
Do you know what kernel version you were running?

Was this years ago, or more recently?

~~~
poelzi
Last try was in maybe ~2012.

I learned from a collegue that if the hard drive implements barriers
incorrectly, this can cause easy XFS corruptions. Maybe this was the reason,
especially SSD firmwares are very complex these days...

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toolslive
XFS is a good choice if you want to build crash resistant applications:
[https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi14/technical-
sessions/...](https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi14/technical-
sessions/presentation/pillai)

(check out the slides, especially slide 40)

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zlynx
XFS better than EXT4 because EXT4 needs fsync()? XFS needs fsync too or you'll
end up with data files full of zeroes.

It happened to me.

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mdekkers
..no actual content besides "We at SuSE have been doing this for
aaaaaaaages"...

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rndmind
BTRFS is an excellent filesystem and imho more advanced than xfs.

~~~
infamouscow
It doesn't matter how advanced your filesystem is if it's going to silently
lose data. The stability of btrfs is a running joke among filesystem
developers.[1]

[1]
[https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page#Stability_...](https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page#Stability_status)

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buffoon
I thought NTFS and ZFS are the enterprise filesystems of choice? We merely
tolerate others. That has been my experience over the last 15 years or so.

~~~
mhurron
NTFS because you have to, ZFS has a little restriction on it that makes it
difficult to be 'of choice' and EXT4 needs to go away for huge volumes.

Linux with a huge volume? Use XFS.

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bnolsen
i recall XFS had some serious corruption issues if a failure happens when not
on a UPS (or the UPS fails catastastrophically). Has this been dealt with ?

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dwdz
Yes, it had but that bug was fixed like 10 years ago. Stop spreading FUD.

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buffoon
Possibly fixed. I've had one incident of an XFS filesystem refuse to mount
after it replayed the journal after a power outage. xfs_repair worked but I
shouldn't have to piss around in single user mode in 2015.

Kit was a HP DL380p, SmartArray 420i SAS array, CentOS 7 about 3 months ago.

Outage caused by a large UPS explosion that took out 100 machines. No NTFS or
ext3/4 trouble at all.

