On 08/02/2014 07:53 PM, Brent L. Bates wrote:
I'm sorry, but the proven, reliable, and fast file system is XFS,
NOT ext4. ext4 is the new kid on the block. XFS has been around for
probably 20 YEARS, if not longer. Half of that time also under Linux.
ext4 hasn't been around nearly that long. XFS is the tried and true,
dependable, reliable, resilient, and fast file system. I've seen it
survive hardware crashes and flaky disk drives and keep on going.
I've used it under both 32bit (not huge disk drives) and 64bit Linux
with no problems. I would not use any other file system under Linux
and if I could, I'd use it under other OS's as well. It is just that
good, fast, and reliable.
Although I am not a strong believer in Wikipedia as an unbiased reliable
resource; I have found it a good starting point. The Wikipedia
statements about the limitations of xFS agree with our experience (we
were an SGI "shop" for a number of years) -- we have not done the file
system comparison attributed to Larabel and thus cannot address that
particular issue from our experience:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFS
Comparison
* An XFS file system cannot be shrunk.
* Metadata operations in XFS have historically been slower than with
other file systems, resulting in, for example, poor performance with
operations such as deletions of large numbers of files. However, a
new XFS feature implemented by Dave Chinner and called /delayed
logging/, available since versoin 2.6.39 of the Linux kernel
mainline <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel_mainline>, is
claimed to resolve this;^[21]
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFS#cite_note-21> performance
benchmarks done by the developer in 2010 revealed performance levels
to be similar to ext4 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext4> at low
thread counts, and superior at high thread counts.^[22]
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFS#cite_note-22>
* In May 2013, M. Larabel published an extensive comparative test of
filesystems on a single SSD which showed XFS to be not yet as fast
as ext4.^[23] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFS#cite_note-23>
I do note that we do not have an implementation with delayed logging --
presumably this is implemented in the current EL7 version.
Assuming that that are no scripts that convert existing extN file system
manipulation scripts into the equivalent EL XFS scripts, is there a
"rosetta stone" that shows the equivalences (translations) for common
operations? (Commonly performed operations including fsck, mount,
format, file system growth and shrinkage, etc.)
Yasha Karnat
