Slashdot Mirror
XFS Beta
Motor writes: "Things have been a bit quiet on the XFS front over the last few months, but a beta is finally here." They've got a document to to read before installing, as well as some installation notes on the site. It looks like it's a patch for 2.4.0-test5 kernel, and you can also get it as RPMs, or ProPack.
Are there any comparisons of these too filesystems, i'm especially interested in the speed of those two....
I'm interested to some extent in XFS because, IIRC, it was optimized for insanely large files (like captured video streams). However, Reiserfs is already here today to serve all your journaling needs.
Head down to http://www.devlinux.com/projects/reis erf s/ and take a look. Its already included by default in the newer SuSE distributions.
This FS has less to offer then ReiserFS and is a lot more new to Linux.
If you wan't to play with development FSes, then please give reiserfs on 2.4 a spin.
works fine. have it on a 40gog drive. lets me create huge files, no fsck on boot. I have used it for about 2 weeks now(that patch has been out for about 3)
Any chance of you putting those patches out for us other Alpha people to test/use? Maybe ftp them to ftp.alphalinux.org? thanks.
The XFS FAQ recommends marking partitions which contain XFS as type 83. This may screw up ext2 aware utilities such as Partition Magic and Ghost as well as possibly making a mess when doing distribution upgrades! What the heck is SGI thinking?!
Default blocksize on IRIX is 4K.
Input requested from
Does the Beta linux driver work with very large IRIX created XFS file systems.
Answer apears to be no.
Thanks
You need to grab the cxx compiler from compaq and recompile POV with it. The increased optimization (expecially against the compaq math libs) might breathe a little life back into your 21164. Info is at: This Page
The 2GB limit was (if I recall correctly) due to the Glibc..
With Redhat 7.0 - this problem is history - so you can use kernel 2.2 and create huge files (I think up to 2 terabytes)
Hetz (Heunique)
In the old days however, Tru64 would only work on Digital Mobos, not on alphaPCs.
On alphapcs, only NT and linux would work. I wonder if that's still the case.
---
"Hasta la victoria siempre!" El Comandante
BUT! It's a 64bit machine... and what I'm reading about XFS sounds interesting. At least I could turn it into a half decent file server.
Anybody knows how stable 2.4.0pre is on the alpha? what about XFS? and what about how optimised GCC is become for the 21x64 processors?
Has compaq got their own journaling fs and a NIX system that works on alphaPC platforms?
---
"Hasta la victoria siempre!" El Comandante
These limits are still in 2.2 kernels, but there are patches which remove it.
I know for sure current suse's ship with it, and probably redhat does the same.
c'ya haegar
Cool, a journaling file system... Remove that off of Microsoft's 'Linux Myths'...
Woah there! Do note that although it's great progress for Linux, XFS for Linux is *still* in Beta. I gather IBM's JFS is coming along too, so the race is on.
--
I've been using ReiserFS as packaged with Mandrake 7.1 whenever and wherever I can, including critical systems. A couple of them litterally mean life or death if they're down, and I've had nothing but success. Were you using an old version?
Latest version.. goooood... Some people always have to stay one or two versions back. I know some people who are going to reforge a web server, and they're tossing on Apache 1.3.9. Why? Oh, there might be some bugs in 1.3.12. Yeah, like there aren't any known bugs in 1.3.9. Hint, they're probably FIXED in 1.3.12! Its not like the Apache folks are going to sit around and say, "You know what? This new 1.3.13 version is totally funky, but lets just push it out. We'll then fix the bugs and then offer the patches named with the exact version level as the funky one." WTF?!? If the developer is hinting that everyone should bump up to the latest version, shouldn't their opinion be trusted, especially if the developer isn't getting any kind of reimbursement for you getting the latest versino?
The laptop now goes through a stop-without-proper-umount and reboot without having to check the filesystems again. I had to change the flags that "lilo" tells the kernel, and had to add flags in /etc/fstab, and had to boot with special flags ("rw") once to create the journal on the root filesystem.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
... I perused the XFS for Linux site, but could not find any information regarding LVM or SGI's toolset (revolving around xlv).
Are they only porting the XFS and none of the LVM support? My memory may be slipping, but I don't recall any mention of LVM (for or against porting to Linux) in any of their online documentation (except for some manpages, which are taken from IRIX)..
XFS without LVM? Disappointing...
Your Working Boy,
The problem is not the kernel. The problem is the xfs code. It just won't compile with 2.95.2. Breaks with some nice "I have no idea what to do with this" messages.
Well, the source will be open, so there's nothing to stop BSD'ers from snarfing the source to port to BSD provided they can get past the licence infection of GPL->BSD. In short, it's probably going to be up to some developers hacking with it.
--
Arse. I used to know that. Damn these version number changes! ;)
Due to known problems with later versions of gcc, version 2.91.66 must be used when compiling XFS and the associated kernel.
Does this mean that gcc 2.9 is officially supported by Linus and co to compile 2.4, or is this just required for XFS?
---
I tried it in August, and had a lot of problems.
I needed XFS support in my Linux box to read a bunch of TGA files from a 18 gigs scsi drive formatted in XFS on a SGI box. Very often my machine crashed and it took me days to get those dawn files. You should wait until the stable version is ready.
Actually, the RAID code has been fixed in 2.2.<late> and 2.4.0pre<mumble>, but I haven't had a chance to look at it yet. I suspect supporting XFS will still take some work. We'll get there.
Martin K. Petersen, XFS team
XFS works with RAID0. RAID1/5 is a bit more tricky, but we'll get to it.
Martin K. Petersen, XFS team
We're working on replacing the current block I/O subsystem in Linux (aimed at 2.5, but will exist in the XFS tree in 2.4). Currently, Linux does block I/O in entities known as buffer_heads, which carry 512 byte payloads. The new scheme is based upon Stephen Tweedie's kiobuf model, and will support big (SCSI supports up to 16 MB/req) I/Os. XFS was primarily designed for big sustained I/Os and once we're done with the kiobuf support we'll start profiling the code and push it to the limits.
Regarding ports to other architectures: My Alpha here at the office is running XFS, but I haven't committed the changes yet. I ported XFS to it for fun a month ago but never got around to committing the changes. I'll do that at some point. And possibly look at SPARC.
But then again. This is Open Source. Feel free to hack on it and send us patches!
Martin K. Petersen, XFS team
This may or may not be a silly question, but... is there a chance this will be available for FreeBSD in the (somewhat near) future?
:-)
Sorry, I'm not trying to be a troll or anything, I just happen to like FreeBSD a bit better...
Hi... I'm Larry... the shivering chipmunk... brrrrr!... I'm cold... I need a sweater...
Currently there seems like a lot of limitation on what software you need and all. glibc 2.1.3, kernel 2.4.test-5, etc.
It is good to see that SGI is still working on this after such a long time of silence. I guess working in the Internet world I kinda expect projects to move at internet time. After all that is what kind of pressures I have to work under. But atlas I am not writing filesystems and drivers.
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
first off
SGI have DRT (Done the Right Thing) so THANK YOU SGI
XFS is compaterble with the IRIX file system but the implementation is differant in parts
I wonder how fast this is compared to others, ext2 blew alot of FS out of the water in terms of speed
anyone got benchmarks of XFS on IRIX and on Linux ?
Well done for geting the PPC port working but what about ARM/MIPS ?
I am compileing it on redhat 7 as I type so will try it out
yes you can compile linux with 2.95.2 but there where problems I would stick to EGCS at the moment and thats what SGI recomend but redhat want 2.96 to work and they are trying to get everything working for the upcoming 3.0
have fun
john jones
(a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
XFS Beta Release Caveats
Size and Memory Limitations 2 Terabyte filesystem limitation
Currently XFS is limited to filesystem smaller that 2 terabytes. This is due to limitations in the Linux block device I/O layers.
The XFS team is working with Linux developers to improve the Linux I/O layers. The improvements will include the support neccesary to exceed 2 Tbyte filesystems.
4 Gbyte memory limitation
Well, those "caveats" won't prevent my servers running for a long time!
Just let me know when they'll be beta testing their boxen on my desktop.
Cheers,
levine
What about ext3 (which provides journalling) - hasn't that been released yet?
ext3 is available as kernel patches from ftp://ftp.uk.linux.org/pub/linux/sc t/f s/jfs/; there's still a bunch of issues to be aware of.
Pro: very nice transition from existing ext2 filesystems and back again. Does journaling so bye-bye long fsck times.
Con: Does data+metadata journaling so write performance is about 1/2 ext2. Must still be classed as experimental, I wouldn't yet go production with ext3 - reiser seems to be stable enoug to use on production systems right now.
If you're interested in stuff increasing the availability of your system (journaling filesystems, hardware monitoring, cluster configurations..) the site to visit is http://www.linux-ha.org, it's got a nice colection of links to the relevant projects.
you have moved your mouse, please reboot to make this change take effect
-- Oh Well
Anyone tried it out yet?
I Really wanna try it, but I don't have a box i can run it on where eat the disk(tm) can be tolerated.
If anybody has any info on how well it works please share..
I like ReiserFS, it's pretty good at what it does, like being a quick and easy journaling FS for your average joe-shmoe desktop power user. I love not having to fsck my 20GB HD on a powerfail. It's really slick that SuSE had ReiserFS in the default install.
HOWEVER.....
XFS is totaly designed as a high performance FS. It is fully 64bit (on 64 bit platforms, not a concern on x86), it is growable (very slick), and has basically everything you'd expect from a high-end "commercial-grade" journaling FS. Why? Cause it is. It's the Journaling FS that SGI designed and uses in all of their completely badass servers.
As for stability, XFS is pretty good now. There are a few issues. I had problems with XFS+Athlon+Ultra/ATA66, but for highend SMP machines with SCSI, XFS can't be beat!
Also, keep an eye out for IBM's JFS in the future.
Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
Tru64 has a hobbyist license for $99.
Check out http://www.unix.digital.com/noncommercial-unix/
Lottery: a tax on those bad at math.
The 2GB limit is due to limits of the linux VFS (virtual file system) layer. These limits are gone in 2.4 kernels. I doubt that even the recent 2.2 kernels have the capability to go over 2GB, but RH 7.0 might prove me wrong.
Personally, I don't really care either. I will never be able to afford that much space (HDD or RAM). And if prices fall to the point where I can afford such things, then I am sure that the kernel team will have solved those problems (considering they will probably own that long before me).
But, I know of servers (Alphas) that already exceed these limits. How am I supposed to convince these servers owners to switch OSes (not that I'm trying anyway)?
Devil Ducky
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
It seems like SGI is a little late in the game... JFS has been available for Linux for quite a while now. I've tried IBM's (which is CASE INSENSITIVE!),
ext3 (which was pretty good but only available for the 2.2.17pre series of kernels), and finially reiserfs (which 100% totally rocks). I'm hoping that reiser
will become the defacto standard journaling filesystem for linux and actually be included in the kernel. It's much faster and allows you to do things that you
couldn't dream of doing with ext2 (i.e., creating 100,000 files in 30 seconds!). It also allows you to choose the hashing algorithm used to store files based on
your filesystem needs (squid caches, giant files, many small files etc...). My only gripe about all the JFS's for linux is that none of them seem to support
quotas yet. Anybody know why this is an issue? I'm not saying that it's not great news to have another option available with XFS though. SGI has a superb
team of engineers, and I'm sure that XFS will be quite useful and dependable when it's done.
A musician without the RIAA, is like a fish without a bicycle.
Will these be stackable block devices??? WE REALLY NEED STACKABLE BLOCK DEVICES!!! ;-)
assert(expired(knowledge));
I don't understand why this is an issue. A block device is a block device. What's so different in the handling of RAID that makes it work unlike a direct-to-disk block device?
My questions aren't meant to be "veiled troll replies"
I'm just talking from personal experience. I have a system that needs to serve gigabytes of data (very large files). Right now its performance needs to be improved. I'm interested in moving this product to 2.4, after it stablizes. Right now I'm stuck with using kernel 2.2.x Why? This hardware must be stable _and_ usable to my users. Having to wait seconds on a 'ls' on a NFS mounted reiserfs partition on a 500 GB raid is not my idea of a good time.
I'm all for having a high performance journalling filesystem, and I don't care which one it is. I'd be more than happy to continue using reiserfs, since I believe it to be the most stable fs for this task right now. What I don't like is, again, the poor 2.2.x NFS performance.
-Jeremy
I keep hearing "kernel people" say that "Journaling Filesystems don't work with Linux' software RAID" but I've been using ReiserFS on a 60GB RAID0 device at home for several months with no problems at all...
For those of us on a budget (like 90% of us are...) and have to use cheap IDE hardware with software RAID, but want the reliability of a journaled filesystem, this is an important question!
-=-=-=-=-
-=-=-=-=-
My mom's going to kick you in the face!
(Shame about that 2 Terabyte size limit, though. I guess I'm gonna have to go buy myself a couple dozen extra hard disks. (that and a RAID controller). :-)
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
anyone who wants to explain what "propack" is?.
i looked at xfs web page and couldnt find any info on it.
-- http://electronicintifada.net --
i dont know if anyone is interessted in this but there is a great article on journaling filesystems at linux gazette.
it explains different features and concepts related to the 4 different journaling filesystems. XFS, JFS, Ext3 and ReiserFS.
-- http://electronicintifada.net --
True but at my company, our experiences with Reiser FS were NOT good.. I believe we had it installed on our of our Arena boxes (100GB) and it ate the file system.. Not good...
UPS Sucks
Cool, a journaling file system... Remove that off of Microsoft's 'Linux Myths'...
Now if we could only communicate Linux's amazing uptime without being anecdotal.
"This is not a company that appears to be bothered by ethical boundaries."
Attorney General Mike Hatch on Microsoft
For the current release of XFS, the filesystem block size is limited to the size of a memory page. On a x86 architecture that size is 4 Kbytes.
Note that files systems created on an IRIX/MIPS platform must have been created with a 4 Kbyte block size in order to be mounted on a ia32 Linux system. File systems not created with a 4k block will fail to mount with an error indicating the mis-match.
You might not need a 2TByte file system, but there are industries where data is getting up into the realm of the PetaByte.
Does anyone know if this will allow files of greater than 2GB in size? According to Stephen Tweedie, ext2 is limited to 2GB due to limits in the kernel. Are these limits lifted in 2.4 or are we going to still be stuck with a 2GB maximum file size for the forseeable future?
HH
Should have been a goatse.cx link, I'm really getting dissapointed in these trolls.
Is fascism really all that bad? People need motivation.