Anyone use XFS?

My experiences are that it's nice and fast, but it can be a pain. For example, when I deleted an existing partition, I was told by mkfs.xfs that I already had an existing ext3/2 filesystem, and that I should use -f to force filesystem creation. Needless to say, it seemed like mkfs.xfs took too little time to complete, as if it didn't do much formatting, even on a big 12+GB partition. It was almost instantaneous. But once I had that Linux+XFS system running, I ran into constant filesystem-related crashes.

To remedy this, I did what the Gentoo docs suggested, and used dd=/dev/zero to zero out the partition before attempting to mkfs.xfs again. Well, it was taking too long on my 12GB partition, so I simply ^C'd after a couple of minutes. After zeroing out the remaining partitions, mkfs.xfs stopped alerting me as to an existing ext3/2 partition. After that, it was smooth sailing with XFS. It was very fast - much faster than ext3, to be sure. My guess is that you don't have to zero out the entire partition before doing mkfs.xfs, but maybe zeroing out maybe the first so many blocks. Maybe something like dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda9 bs=1k count=10000k, or something like that. Of course, it helps to have the xfsprogs (xfs_repair, xfs_check) installed, I suppose...

My experience has been pretty much the same. I'm using it with Debian unstable here at home and have been very happy with it. I haven't had any file system corruption problems, but I also haven't really had any opportunities for them to occur.

Not to change the subject too much, but I've been using ext3 with Red Hat at work and have been pretty happy with that as well. What I would love to know though, is which of the four journalling file systems (ext3, XFS, JFS, ReiserFS) is really the best to use on a desktop/development/workstation system? I suppose it's probably at least partially subjective, but I can't help wondering if would be better off using one of the others (particularly JFS) instead.

I've been very tempted to replace my current Debian system with Gentoo; at this point I would stay with XFS but I wonder if I'm making a mistake.

Regards,

Ditto!

Let every man judge for themselves.

I suggest try it. I tried it and came back.

I'm just too used to Debian's stable system and I just can't spend 5 days compiling my system on my Pentium III 500.

Try it. You know your going to.

Perhaps you will like it better.

I think that is a good idea(tm).

I never had any crashes while running XFS. (I run the developmental versions however...)

Yes it is amazingly fast, especially on large files... Nice features like logs on different devices and realtime subvolume and DMAPI make it a very interesting filesystem.

I never had the problems you described, but then again i'm running SCSI... Are you using IDE? It could be an IDE related problem...

xfs_repair you only need after a _really_ nasty crash (kernel panic).

But if you can't wait, this will get you started:

Blank passwords, just hit enter. These *only* have to be done once, their results are stored in $HOME/.cvspass

############# CUT HERE ############### #!/bin/bash cd $HOME

mkdir gcc/objdir (cd gcc/objdir && ../configure

Datagram from Eric Bamberg incoming on netlink socket

Yes it does, but don't use that. FAT16 is not featureful enough to host a working GNU/Linux system. Sure, UMSDOS and DEVFS could help. FAT partitions in Linux are useful as miscannelous storage at best.

Oh, I was kidding. I'll definitely use one of the journalling file systems, most likely XFS since that's what I'm using now and I'm happy with it.

Datagram from Stuart Krivis incoming on netlink socket

EXT3 has three operational modes, and data is journaled only in one of them. The two others only journal metadata.