Re: Will we ever see XFS supported in Red Hat Enterprise Linux?

[Jon Lewis <jlewis@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 28 Aug 2005, Bryan J. Smith wrote:

> To be honest, I haven't been deploying XFS as much since the
> official XFS 1.2 on Red Hat Linux 7.x (plus one 1.3 on Red
> Hat Linux 9).  The Red Hat Linux 7.x installs definitely have
> the most time, and I very much trust and appreciate its
> availability.

If these releases were so stable, could someone from SGI please put them 
back up on the oss.sgi.com FTP server?  I've got a RH 8.0 based system 
(switching/upgrading the entire distro hoping for XFS stability is not an 
option...if I have to do that, I'm abandoning XFS) that's really not 
behaving well using Red Hat's kernel RPMs rebuilt with the XFS 1.3.0 
release.  If there's something more stable that works (never did hear back 
about why NFSD in the SGI xfs-cvs 2.4 kernel is broken), I'd like to give 
it a try before copying a couple hundred GB of mail to EXT3.

> And then there's the big damn size issue.  That's the kicker.
> I'm trying put to in >1.1TB (>1TiB) filesystems and I have
> to start explaining the limitations to clients.  That just
> eats right into the MS FUD / Windows pundit non-sense.

huh?  From what I've read, ext3 can handle up to 4TB filesystems.  What 
problems do you run into with >1TB, but <4TB?  I realize, XFS being 64-bit 
means it can have filesystems of inconceivable size...but after recent 
threads on this list about how xfs_repair needs considerable RAM in order 
to repair large fs's, abusing XFS's fs size limit seems a really bad idea. 
You may end up with a damaged fs that requires 128gb of RAM to repair. 
Then what will you do with that multi-TB damaged fs?

> I'm not some ReiserFS puke or JFS enthusiast, I've got XFS in
> production.  But it's all old systems.

Same here.  Unfortunately, it was put into production without sufficient 
testing and has never been entirely stable.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Jon Lewis                   |  I route
 Senior Network Engineer     |  therefore you are
 Atlantic Net                | 
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