I've been using XFS for a while, but find myself in a bit of a quandry
about where to go now...
A week or two ago, my main server got very flaky (semi-constant
rebooting), so I replaced the Athlon UP MB/CPU for a nice
Athlon MP version. It came up fine with the kernel at the time
(2.4.9-31SGI_XFS_1.1, no data loss or errors), so I upgraded to
smp-2.4.18-4SGI_XFS_1.1 to get a recent MP-based kernel.
The server has a 3ware RAID controller, and also uses LVM, so I've been
paying attention to versions of these drivers. 2.4.18 and previous
had old versions of the 3ware driver, so I would compile a new version
whenever I changed kernels.
This is when I noticed that the UP XFS 2.4.18-4 (could have been
XFS 2.4.18 instead) kernel had LVM 1.0.3, whereas SMP XFS 2.4.18-4
has 1.0.1-rc4. I also found that SMP XFS 2.4.18-4 seemed to hit the
disk a lot for writes, almost like it had no or only a very small
kernel-level write cache/XFS pre-allocation space. (write cache is off
on the controller)
Since the performance was noticably bad because of this, I switched last
night to SMP 2.4.18-SGI_XFS_1.1. This seems to have solved my performance
problem, but I now I have 2 new problems. 1) I'm left with LVM 1.0.1-rc4,
and 2) I can't compile a new 3w-xxxx driver (the module compiles, but I get
"Undefined symbols" when I run the depmod to verify installation).
So the quandry is: Where should I go from here? So far,
2.4.18-SGI_XFS_1.1 seems to have solved the performance issue I was
seeing, but has old LVM and 3w-xxxxx drivers which I'd like to upgrade.
It looks like 2.4.19 has LVM 1.0.3 and the correct 3w-xxxx driver version
already. So I could compile up my own kernel, but the only XFS patch I
see for 2.4.19 is a CVS snapshot from last week. I'm leary of using a
snapshot for an integral part of the kernel, but there doesn't seem to
be a 1.1 patch for 2.4.19 (and the 2.4.18 patch seems to be XFS 1.1-PR2).
Any thoughts? Thanks. :)
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