Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

XFS Merged into Linux 2.4

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the journals-are-for-girls dept.

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."

20 of 265 comments (clear)

  1. ext3vs XFS? by dummkopf · · Score: 3, Interesting

    back in the days when ext3 was still in our dreams i downloaded the SGI XFS kernel from their site and installed it on my wife's laptop. it was extremely stable and had the advantage, that her "oops, i have to run off and just close the lid"-atacks would not corrupt the filesystem (which i would have to clean up...).

    nowadays i use ext3 on my machines because it comes default with RH (by the way EL is now available for academia, woohoo!). hence my question:

    can someone offer a nice comparison of ext3 versus XFS?

    1. Re:ext3vs XFS? by HidingMyName · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Does linux have an XFS dump/restore ported to it? That makes a difference for our installation. Currently we use ext3fs so that we can dump to tape (in spite of Linus's hate for dump, the admin features of dump are very useful).

    2. Re:ext3vs XFS? by mcbridematt · · Score: 3, Interesting

      yeah, just hold the poweroff button :)

      For me, ext3 doesn't offer much data redundancy over plain old ext2. It still suffers from ext2's dataloss problems. Infact, with ext3, I had the horror of i/o errors. Once I had a bad powerdown, and I came close to reformatting just because it wouldn't let me into php.conf.

      Personally, anyone looking for a data-redundancy fix should use ReiserFS (which we have had for a looong time), JFS or XFS.

  2. Benchmarks by Space+cowboy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Any up-to-date comparisons between the 3 main journalling filesystems (ext3, xfs, reiserfs), for both speed and reliability ?

    I like xfs on the SGI - it's never let me down yet. I have to admit I'll be sorely tempted to try out xfs now that it's passed the 'seal-of-approval' and made it into the kernel - surely the best benchmark of all :-)

    Simon

    --
    Physicists get Hadrons!
  3. NTFS not GPL, FAT not free by James+McP · · Score: 4, Interesting

    SGI released XFS into "the wild" and has ensured its longevity with little to no support on their part and increased the number of "out of box" coders they can hire to work on FS projects.

    Microsoft....hasn't. Heck, MS is preparing to charge media makers (CF, SM, MMC, etc) to use FAT.

    I say media makers switch to using XFS or another GPL'd journaling file systems. Won't take long for other platforms to support it in bulk (make/ config.....) and for stuff like flash where corruptions can occur often, I'd like a bit of journaling to minimize the impact.

    --
    I've been on slashdot so long I'm starting to get out of touch with the cool stuff if it ain't on slashdot.
    1. Re:NTFS not GPL, FAT not free by AllUsernamesAreGone · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The problem with using jouranling filesystems on removable media like CF is that it takes more processor power and space than normal filesystems (for example, resiserfs partitions allocate 30Mb for journal space by default). That journal always takes some space, and the less space you allocate, the less effective the journal is for handling problems.

      ext2 on its own though....

  4. Re:I say what....? by irc.goatse.cx+troll · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Faster, More trusted (SGI's been using it for how many years now?), not sure how it compares cpu-wise.
    The main thing that keeps me on ext3 is ext2 backwards compatability. You dont have to worry about having custom repair/bootdisks to recognize your install, and its easier to do stuff like mount under windows (great for dual booting)

    --
    Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
  5. I love XFS by Apreche · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Back in the day I would always just use ext2. Then I realized, hey there are other filesystems to choose from, so I decided to shoot in the dark and try reiser and xfs and ext3. xfs has always been the most awesome.

    Just one thing. Now that we've got the source code for dealing with xfs, can someone write a driver so I can mount my xfs partitions from windows xp? It would really help out a lot of us dual booting types. I would do it myself, but I don't know jack about how filesystems work. I just know which ones do what.

    I hope they put the xfs into 2.6 also. Maybe it wont be necessary to have seperate xfs-sources in gentoo anymore and xfs will finally be included in the gentoo-sources.

    --
    The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
    1. Re:I love XFS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      The reason we see so few file system drivers for windows is that it's blody hard :( On Linux, adding a filesystem to the kernel is really easy, the API is clear and it doesn't touch other parts of the system. With Windows its a blody mess. And yes, I've tried to write an ext3 driver for W2K. Now I'm not knocking MS specifically, but it clearly shows that they never thought anybody would like to do somethign this.

    2. Re:I love XFS by red+floyd · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The reason we see so few file system drivers for windows is that it's blody hard :(

      Not to mention fscking expensive. The regular DDK is free (for NT/2K) or cost of media (for the XP/2K3 DDKs), but the IFS Kit is $1000 US. And not well documented, from what I understand.

      If anyone is going to try to write these for Windows, may I recommmend you check out OSR?

      Disclaimer: No relation with OSR except as a satisfied client of their driver class.

      --
      The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
  6. its about time by Buckwheatz_tm · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I have been using it for for almost 3 years now. It has never let me down unlike some of the other journaling filesystems. No corrupt superblock like jfs. Kinda slow for small files when the parttions reach around 80% full. Plus its sure to piss SCO off :) but for video editing or files over 100kb it can't be beat. Reiserfs is great for directories like /var since 2.4.18 but I have lost too much data in the past to the bugger.

  7. We've just begun by fserb · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I agree with Marcelo's action on this. We're still in a very early stage of the 2.6 (stable) branch to feature freeze 2.4.

    I know we need the maximum user base for 2.6 testing, debugging and to recieve those "My TV stopped working when I installed kernel 2.6" messages. But we have to take it easy.

    2.6 rocks. And a lot of distros have plans to release 2.6 based releases in the first quarter of 2004, which will greatly improve the user base.

    IMHO, a good feature freeze, as Marcelo said somewhere in LKML, is 2.4.24 or even 2.4.25.

    It's no time for a flamewar to begin. The Beaver is in the building. :)

  8. Patch size. by rf0 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Fun for the whole family with guess where the patch was applied From the snapshot directory

    bk6 - 424K

    bk7 - 964k

    bk8 - 1.2M

    Well thats increased the kernel by about another 5-10%. However I would say I do like xfs and its proven quite stable now.

    Rus

    --
    Cheap UK and US VPS
  9. Christoph Hellwig, former SCO (Caldera)! by infolib · · Score: 4, Interesting

    after a code review by Christoph Hellwig

    Incidentally, this is the Christoph Hellwig who contributed code to the kernel on Calderas behalf. His contributions may become an important point in the SCO-IBM-RedHat battle.

    --
    Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
  10. Oddly Enough by thesolo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This was just mentioned here on /. the other day, but according to this article on Groklaw, Christoph Hellwig is (was?) a Caldera (SCO) employee.

    SCO is going after SGI for XFS, when one of their own employees was working on it.

  11. Finally by LynXmaN · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've been using XFS in production servers for more than two years already without any problem, it was time that it was merged into 2.4 kernel...

    Maybe this way RedHat begins to support it for their installations

    --
    May the source be with you!
  12. Hellwig's role in all this by einhverfr · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Iirc, isn't he a former SCO/Caldera employee who was heavily involved in developing SMP and the Linux port of JFS? Iirc, Groklaw has a thing on this.

    Now he works for SGI. The question I have is this-- it seems as if he has a conflict of interest to give his employer a beneficial review of the driver in order to ensure that it is included. I wonder how independent he is in his review.

    That being said, he has been an important contributor to the kernel, and so I will give him the benefit of the doubt. I just wish that some sort of third-party review would have been done.

    OTOH, there has been some speculation that Marcelo was biased against the inclusion, so maybe this balances things out.

    --

    LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
  13. Quotas! by mattbee · · Score: 2, Interesting

    From what I could find out XFS is the only Linux filesystem which stores quota information as meta-data-- there's no risk of an XFS filesystem getting its quotas "out of sync" with the contents of the disc and having to run a tedious quotacheck. We recently deployed it as a backup server and it's working very well!

    --
    Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
  14. Re: FINALLY! by jbeamon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've been patching XFS support into my distro for a few months now. Let me get you caught up briefly. We had ext3 patched with acl support. That patch tends to lag behind kernel versions a little, which is not a problem if you're running a distro's standard back-ported kernel. However, I just undertook a migration on a live production box from ext3+acl to XFS on a second attached disk array, so I've been in Patch Hell for the last few weeks. I will say up front that I am not a k3rn31 h4ck0rz, but I get more done with it than probably anyone I personally know. That I got as far as I did in this story amazes me even today!

    SGI ports their patch up to the latest kernel within a few days, but they have a nasty habit of removing older versions from their downloads when newer versions come out. When I only had the ext3+acl patches for kernel 2.4.20, and acl.bestbits.at was down for over a week ('grumble'), SGI only had XFS patches out for kernel 2.4.22. Andreas was kind enough to personally provide me some 2.4.22 ext3 patches. By the hardest, I got my 2.4.22 kernel built on my file server with ext3+acl and XFS.

    The next DAY, I read of a root exploit in 2.4.22. The patch from kernel.org rendered my ext3+acl patches incompatible, and I'm not the type of guy yet to divvy up patches into even smaller pieces on any sort of schedule. I had to either forego backward compatibility or maintain a shell exploit in an environment where people do have shells.

    I found, just yesterday, that Red Hat's newest kernel package includes xattrs and acls for ext3 and the 2.4.22 exploit's bugfix. It won't accept my xfs patch for 2.4.23 over some posix_acl and kdb conflicts. I found yesterday that SGI's latest kernel image has XFS and ext3+acl, but not the bugfix. The 2.4.23 patch broke my build. I find today that XFS is about to be added onto the native kernel tree, which just received both the bugfix and the ext3+acl extensions.

    It's about TIME! :-D

    --
    -j
  15. How to securely delete journaled data? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    When using the shred utility, I get warnings about not using the utility for journaled filesystems.

    So what utility can I use to securely delete data on a journaled file system?

    And being a previous windows user, I really liked the BCWipe utility that securely wiped unused areas of a partition. Is there an equivalent in linux systems?