XFS Merged into Linux 2.4

Alphix writes "As noted on KernelTrap Marcelo has merged XFS into 2.4 after a code review by Christoph Hellwig. The mail from Marcelo on LKML is here. Apparently it touched very little VFS code so people not using XFS shouldn't see any ill effects from this (it's even supposed to fix some VFS bugs). XFS is described by SGI as '...a journalling filesystem developed by SGI and used in SGI's IRIX operating system. It is now also available under GPL for linux. It is extremely scalable, using btrees extensively to support large and/or sparse files, and extremely large directories. The journalling capability means no more waiting for fsck's or worrying about meta-data corruption.' Let the stability vs. new-features flamewar begin."

Comments

but NTFS

[Anonymous Coward]

is still in RO ?!

Re:Careful with LILO

[mark_lybarger]

LILO? dude, that's like, so 199^N^N^N^ er, debianish. that bacon's done moved over ages ago.

Why so much fuss over JFS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just wondering, why does everyone get so excited about journaling filesystems? Many distros default to ext3/reiserfs now for even home boxes, but it's like a big band-aid.

If your box is crashing enough to make fscking a chore, you already have bigger problems. Sure, I can see where JFSs are sometimes useful, but on dekstops and most other machines the better-performing ext2 is a much more appropriate choice.

Re:Careful with LILO

[Viol8]

And which of the crappy bug ridden alternatives would you suggest? Lilo is small, compact and does what it says on the tin. All I want is
a loader to boot linux & BSD, I'm not looking for a mini OS to fuck around with 101 pointless options that are nothing more than someones wet dream.

Re:Careful with LILO

[Anonym0us Cow Herd]

I was not aware that the alternatives were bug ridden. I use Grub because it was what SuSE 8.2 wanted to run by default. My first reaction was "Oh God, why did they have to change what I was already familiar with?". But after reading up on Grub, I would never want to go back to LILO. Grub is extremely convenient. What you can do at boot time is more powerful. Changing kernels or initrd images is much easier. You can just rename kernel files so that the new kernel has the name of your old kernel. Grub goes by the filename, because it has a mini-filesystem driver for several filesystems.

You setup a smallish /boot partition in any of the supported filesystems, and put the kernel and initrd into it.

I can think of a number of enhancements for modern bloat loaders....

• Screensaver while idle at boot screen
• games while booting up
• support for latest 3D chipsets and audio drivers for the eye/ear candy while booting

...of course the end result of these enhancements will mean that we'll have to make Linux more like Windows so that people will see the boot loader more often.

Re:ext3vs XFS?

[Nothinman]

I hope you verify those backups because Linus' hate for dump has a reason behind it.

Re:ext3vs XFS?

[Merlin42]

in response to:
http://aurora.zemris.fer.hr/filesystems/
Thi s seems like a pretty poorly designed benchmark. One of the major tests was copying b/w two partitions (which is a valid test), but they put both partitions on the same disk! Whichever partition hapened to be allocated near the outside edge of the disk would have a clear advantage. Also it is not clear if the read, write, and delete portions of the test were done using the exact same partition or if some filesystems were handicapped by being on the inside partition when others got the outside partition.