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XFS 1.0 is Released
Isldeur was the first of many to note that SGIs now open source Journaling File System "XFS" has announced the release of
version 1.0. It, Reiser, the new ext format continue to be an area of debate, but regardless, Journaling file systems are nice to eliminate those slow fsck boot ups, and to protect all your pr0n when you lose power and realize that you plugged the UPS into your stereo by mistake (not that I've done that. No sir.)
For those of you looking for comparisons, why not check http://www.softpanorama.org/Internals/filesystems. shtml
which appears to have links to information on a variety of filesystems (most of the journalled FSs under Linux) and even NTFS.
SGI is going to put Linux on their Big Systems(tm) when the Itanium-class CPUs start shipping. They've been planning this for a while now. The current generation of Onyx/Origin boxen are designed with multiple CPU architectures in mind -- e.g. you will be able to have a MIPS system or an IA-64 system just by swapping a single brick.
The eventual plan is to have Linux for the Intel servers and IRIX on the MIPS ones, with IRIX being phased out over a long period of time so as to keep the old customers from getting paranoid. There's even rumors internally about servers with *BOTH* intel and MIPS processors in them running Linux. If you watch SGI's Linux pages, you'll notice that more and more support is made available for running Linux on R10K, R12K and other heavy-duty processors, not to mention SGI's memory architectures (e.g. ccNUMA).
My own theory is that the now-EOLed 320/540 workstations were an experiment to see how SGI's customer base would react to non-MIPS/IRIX workstations and to get everyone warm to the idea of SGI branching out.
SGI is a company to watch over the next few years, and releasing things like open-sourced XFS for Linux are just teasers of what's to come.
(I don't count NTFS, because that is hard-pushed enough to be called a genuine filesystem, never mind a journalling one.)
Feel free to reply to this, adding any that I've missed.
The Logging filesystem does much the same thing as Ext3 - it is an extension to Ext2 - but it looks like it would be a lot more useful than Ext3. IMHO, it'd be much better if neither of them were so FS-specific and could be used as a generic wrapper. SnapFS does exactly this, for example.
Anyway, on with the list of Journalling Filling systems...
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Lilo in the MBR works just fine with XFS. There are no issues, I have 3 machines that boot that way.
A lot of people have been complaining that there is no 2.4.4 patch - but bear in mind that 2.4.4 is only 3 days old. We'd be a bit nuts to release 1.0 on a kernel as untested as that.
On the other hand, the devel cvs tree is usually updated within a few days of a new kernel release. As soon as the kinks get out of XFS+2.4.4, it'll be in the devel cvs tree.
The majority of our 1.0 testing has been done on 2.4.2, so we have the most confidence in XFS there. We also have a 2.4.3 patch which should be fine, although it has not had as much direct testing.
We realize that there are issues with 2.4.2 (loop device, anyone?) If you're concerned about fix-ups, and you run an RPM-based systems, you might take a look at the Red Hat kernel RPMs we offer - those include a ton of patches from Red Hat - essentially the same kernel as shipped with 7.1, with XFS added.
If you're concerned about netfilter, just get the patch - I would be very surprised if it conflicted in any way with an XFS-enabled kernel.
It seems like one of the nastiest problems when you want to promote a new filesystem is getting LILO, SILO, MILO... to load a kernel image off of the filesystem. What are the issues involved here? Do these loaders really only support ext2fs? If so, this would prevent a user from having a completely journalled system, right? Perhaps there are ways of fixing this (like backups of the /boot partition on a journaled fs) but it would be cool (I think) to have a mini-fsck run on the boot partition before the kernel boots.
There may be issues here; perhaps a MD5 sum or something of the sort might be better to check that the boot partition is uncorrupted. The sum would be checked against... what?
This post is as much an RFC as anything else. Go at it!
Sigmentation fault - core dumped
So does XFS. From one of SGI's own presentations:
[emphasis added]
This is *normal* for a journaling filesystem. Very very few actually log or otherwise protect file data, because of the cost. Maintaining a metadata-only log is already a significant performance limiter, and journaling data as well would just be prohibitively expensive. Most users wouldn't even want it, if they had to pay the performance cost.
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I have been using XFS on my home machines since v0.9. The installer has had a couple of glitches in the past (0.9 left me without access to the network and my cdrom drive by default). The recent beta fixed a lot of problems and was based on RedHat 7.1 (as opposed to 7.1 betas from earlier releases).
;)
I haven't tried the 1.0 release yet. There's only so many hours in the day. On the other hand, the last install I did with the beta, after installing everything I wanted, I fired up a dozen programs such as Mozilla, GIMP, Nautilus, etc. While the drive was churning, I hit the power switch. For those of you who have used ReiserFS, I'm sure this is no big deal.
It should be noticed that on my Athlon 800MHz w/ 128MB of RAM and a 27GB hard drive, I almost missed the filesystem check as it scrolled by on bootup. That had me sold forever on journaling filesystems.
I haven't seen any visible performance differnece though. There may be, but so much has changed on my system that any subjective comparisons are almost impossible/meaningless. For example, devfs is enabled by default, there's a more up-to-date kernel and the drive has a different partition layout. Who could tell what the FS performance difference may be. I definitely don't need to go back to ext2 just to see if my switchover was justified. Any more info will just be icing.
If someone wants to post "real" benchmarks (lies, damn lies, and all that) I'd love to see them too.
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I dont know how it compares to XFS. But go here to see how ReiserFS compares to Ext2, Ext3. (Hint: it kicks its ass). Add in journaling and you have a killer combo. XFS is a little more industrial strength as opposed to general purpose. If you're streaming gigabyte files and processing them on the fly, I imagine XFS is the way to go.
Well, the biggest difference is that XFS is proven and Reiser isn't yet. XFS has been the IRIX filesystem for something like 6 years now, and the on-disk filesystem format does not change between revisions, even during the development stage. You can even mount an IRIX disk under linux and read and write normally. The only thing in development in XFS were the userland and kernel-space tools. Compare that the Reiser where things tend to change a fair bit much.
Some basic info and a couple of links for folks:
- file system - basic defition -the general name given to the logical structures and software routines used to control access to the storage on a hard disk system. Operating systems use different ways of organizing and controlling access to data on the hard disk, and this choice is basically independent of the specific hardware being used--the same hard disk can be arranged in many different ways, and even multiple ways in different areas of the same disk.
- Journaled file system - Basic definition (as seen here)
- IBMs JFS webpage on their system, along with links for for downloads and turtorials online,etc
There is an awfull lot of info at the SGI site. Just poke around.A file system in which the hard disk maintains data integrity in the event of a system crash or if the system is otherwise halted abnormally. The journaled file system (JFS) maintains a log, or journal, of what activity has taken place in the main data areas of the disk; if a crash occurs, any lost data can be recreated because updates to the metadata in directories and bit maps have been written to a serial log. The JFS not only returns the data to the pre-crash configuration but also recovers unsaved data and stores it in the location it would have been stored in if the system had not been unexpectedly interrupted.
As far as the question about how to choose file systems, that is often a matter of what the OS will let you get away with, and your needs. Using FAT 16 is recommended if you need to maintain compatibility with MSDOS, for example. Usually, this is something like if you have a multi boot scenario, and which OSen can mount which partitions with which partitions. MS is notoriously picky in this regard, with a "My way or the Highway approach". For example, if you have a single hard drive hooked up to your computer for configuration purposes, You cannot just create anextended partition unless that drive is a salve with another master. If you want to create just an extended partition it will not permit, and tell you that you can only create a primary dos partition instead.
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XFS has a few things that Reiser doesn't. One of the biggest things I can think of is Syncrhonous/Asynchronous IO, Modifiable Journal sizes(at create time), and the journals are entirely different. So, while reiser is WAY kewl, XFS offers more in the way of the capabilities Veritas offers. This I like because it's more like having a FREE version of veritas. Most people don't use all the capabilities of that slow bloated beast anyway, so something which still journals like a champ, and a bit faster overall than reiserfs, is ok by me. I'd been using ReiserFS for several months now, and am running it on my oracle server. I recently reinstalled with the RedHat XFS install cd that SGI put out and I must say it is definitely faster in many respects than reiser. Also, the error instance boot time startup log checks are almost 'un-noticeable'. This I feel is a much needed change compared to that of reiserfs or ext3. I still await Tux2 However, to hopefully be an inline replacement to ext2. But for now, my systems will use both Reiserfs, and XFS for sure! Nothing but goodness so far!
--SuperBug
My favorite utility of the xfs distribution. Where else could you find so much joy about a program that does nothing?
If you watch SGI's strategy, they seem to be moving towards that direction. They are keeping Irix around primarily because Linux isn't ready and there aren't any good 64-bit processors out that fit with their business model other than a MIPS, right now.
I mean, think about it. Why bother writing all of the kernels and utilities when you can have the hackers of the world pick up the slack? SGI can't put as many developers on Irix as MS can put on Windoze. So they are developing Irix only for the MIPS machines and keeping Linux for their Intel machines.
And the strategy is pretty evident. They have been very supportive of good OpenGL under Linux. They have XFS, clustering software, etc. All of the Irix advantages are getting ported over.
The problem is that they haven't been able to move over to the Intel platform properly. Their first attempt was a fiasco. The Onyx 3000 series was designed to be a transitional system. It can work with either a MIPS processor or an Itanium. But the Itanium delays are making that hard. And, unlike the desktop workstations, you can't stuff a Pentium 4 in a Onyx because you need 64 bit addressing to make their NUMA architecture work -- each processor gets a piece of the address space. With a 512 processor Onyx 3000, that makes 8 megs of RAM per processor. So Intel is holding up SGI's full migration to Linux.
Now, as far as the stability of SGI, I'm not entirely sure. They are still bleeding money, and at a faster rate than last year, too. Given the downturn in the tech economy, they are going to be hit with it, too. It's very shakey.
Gentoo Sucks
XFS has ACLs, unlike ReiserFS and ext3 (last time I checked).
Also, XFS comes with xfsdump and xfsrestore, which can back up and restore the ACLs. I believe it is the only ACL-enabled file system for Linux which has such utilities (unless you count AFS).
So for a production environment where you want ACLs, XFS is the only choice right now. And it seems likely to remain so for a while.
Also, Samba 2.2 has built-in integration with XFS ACLs, making Linux+XFS+Samba a very interesting option for replacing NT file servers.