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XFS File-System Maintainer Stepping Down (www.phoronix.com)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[-] [email protected] 88 points 11 months ago 
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

[-] [email protected] 47 points 11 months ago

Darrick nominated Chandan Babu of Oracle to handle release management for XFS

Oracle? 🤨 Oh boy...

[-] [email protected] 38 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

The Linux team at Oracle are ok I think. Based on the blog post they made about the Red Hat debacle. Sounds like they are true Linux guys so it should be ok

[-] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago

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?

[-] [email protected] 28 points 11 months 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.

[-] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

The RHEL (and Fedora) defaults are quite good, too.

[-] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago

Xfs is basically a bigger, better ext4.

It has more features but it also isn't as weird and wacky as btrfs and zfs.

Honestly I'm not sure it shouldn't be the default fs for most distros, except it wasn't born in the Linux kernel like ext and btrfs, but it's been here forever and it's been very well behaved, unlike others I can mention.

Used it for a while on lvm raid, xfs was never what gave me problems.

[-] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago

XFS is rock solid and still has active development going on, so why not.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Main reason I stopped using it ten years ago.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

But are there benefits over ext4 and BTRFS these days?

[-] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Just to clarify, the previous comment asked about benefits of XFS over ext4. But I completely agree with your reasons for choosing ext4.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

ZFS has deduplication, you just don't want to use it. As deduplication grows, it requires more and more RAM on the ZFS server. :(

[-] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

Dedupe hash table can be moved to ssd but obviously slower

[-] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Yeah but veeam doesn't support fast block cloning which means you don't need to ever recopy blocks that don't change. From a performance point of view, fast block cloning gives incredible speed up so that in turn means more backups happen in a short time. That's pretty important even at our small business scale. I guess larger veeam service providers solve things differently.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Hmm, now I wonder how well NTFS deduplication stacks up against XFS and ZFS.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Well enough, I guess, that I'd never heard if NTFS having that feature 'till now. ;)

[-] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

I am pretty sure certain apps want xfs. One I can think of is veeam who leverage their block cloning feature for some of their stuff.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

I use XFS on partitions where I need to implement project quotas.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Why not zfs?

[-] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

I have no experience with ZFS and didn't know it supported project quotas too. I found out about XFS from an LPIC book where it said that XFS, unlike other filesystems, also supported project quotas (this was about 10 years ago). It's been working fine for me the past few years, so I've never looked for alternatives. Now I'm curious.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Fairly sure zfs has been able to do dataset quotas for about 20 years, totally worth looking into

this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
173 points (100.0% liked)

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