On Sun, 18 Nov 2001 at 09:03, Christian Zander wrote:
> I have been using xfs for quite a while now and I have been mostly
> happy with it for its performance and utilities. There is one issue,
> however, that I have run into a couple of times and that I consider
> grave and makes me consider switching back to another journaling
> filesystem.
Just so you know, I've been using both ReiserFS and XFS on a number of
systems for quite awhile now. I'm basically happy with them but your
"complaints" in this email are legitimate. The only way out for you will
probably be ext3fs and its ordered or full data journalling.
> I've had problems with severe file corruption; i.e. several times,
> files had been opened at the time of a system hang were overwritten
> with zeros and hence completely trashed. Affected files were files
> opened in editors and configuration files such as XF86Config. This has
> been happening randomly but also fairly regularly and doesn't seem to
> be specific to certain hard- or software setups. The last occurance
> happened with 2.4.14. I'm building xfs with gcc-2.91.66 as
> recommended.
This is the main concern with journalling filesystems that only journal
metadata. In particular I've found that XFS is sensitive to this. If you
open a file for modification and save just in time for a system lockup or
power failure, your entire file will be filled with null characters. There
is an explanation on why this happens (your file getting filled up with
null characters) in the FAQ <http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/faq.html>.
Note that ReiserFS is succeptible to such too, but I found that it's not
as vulnerable. I don't know why. I just read an article on ext3fs, and
both "data=ordered" and "data=journal" should handle your problem real
well.
Personally I think XFS is still the best for a stable server with backup
power. This is because on a server you not just want that quick
(negliglbe) unclean recovery on startup, but you want to squeeze that last
bit of stable performance. ReiserFS is also good but XFS can scale much
better with high loads as a number on the list will attest to.
For workstations and kiosks, however, ext3fs seems to be a very good
choice as filesystem performance will probably be secondary to data
integrity offered by "data=ordered" and "data=journal".
--> Jijo
--
Federico Sevilla III :: jijo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Network Administrator :: The Leather Collection, Inc.
GnuPG Key: <http://jijo.leathercollection.ph/jijo.gpg>
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