Re: grub disaster with FC4 & XFS

["George N. White III" <aa056@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 30 Sep 2005, Aly Dharshi wrote:

> That would be excellent, I have asked the FC mailing list for ideas on 
> how to get this in the main stream anaconda without having to type linux 
> xfs all the time at the install boot prompt to get XFS support.
>
> I don't understand why they are so resistant to adding XFS and ReiserFS 
> support to FC and Anaconda. I would be very interested in knowing the 
> reason.

I think someone from RH said "it doesn't add any new capabilities". While 
this may be true for RH's core market -- web services and transaction 
processing -- it certainly isn't true for some workloads.

Is there an O'Reilly book (or if not, then why not) that discusses the 
major filesystems and their suitability for different workloads in a way
that can be used to plan installations?

I don't care whether Anaconda supports XFS because the sure-fire approach 
is better guidance to help people choose the proper filesystem and 
partitioning for their workload.  If such guidance recommends XFS to 
important RH customers, Anaconda FC will get XFS so fast you will 
discover those feelings of shock and awe that went missing in a recent war.

I think there are some expanding markets (video surveillance and certain 
document processing systems) that will create a demand for the 
capabilities of XFS.  Once a big RH customer runs into problems that are 
best solved with XFS, you will get your wish. In a year or so, a system 
lots of 2.5 in SAS drives will let people do things for a tiny fraction of 
the cost of doing it with today's high end configurations.  Some of those 
things will benefit from XFS.

Red Hat puts a lot of effort into making sure even FC users don't have bad 
experiences because their market is all about admins not having bad days. 
XFS really isn't comfortable on the hardware configuration of this week's 
typical desktop PC.  Making it easy for people to configure XFS may lead 
to a lot of people having bad experiences because they don't have the 
right hardware and are doing things that aren't really meant for XFS.

--
George N. White III  <aa056@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>