clflush wrote:
Hi,
I have a few simple questions regarding the XFS file system. I built a new
small server here (commodity hardware, x86-64) and I've installed 32-bit
openSUSE 10.2 on it. After the system was installed, configured and up and
running, it hung while I was browsing with Firefox. The only thing I could do
was to press the reset button on the computer. After the reboot, when I
opened Firefox again, I noticed that all my bookmarks were gone. Those
bookmarks were imported from my desktop machine a few days after I configured
the new server.
All file systems on this new server are XFS because I heard good things about
it and it generally performs better in database operations compared to other
file systems available for Linux. However, I was pretty surprised that when I
had to reset the machine because it hung for some reason, all the bookmarks
in Firefox were gone, so now I have my doubts about the reliability and data
integrity of XFS. My older server, which also runs openSUSE 10.2 (32-bit) but
uses Ext3 as file system never had such issues and I had to reset it many
times because it was hanging for some reason.
sounds like you have several reliability problems ;-)
Am I right to assume that XFS compared to Ext3 does not do a very good job
regarding data integrity? I know a little bit about file systems and I know
that most file systems depend on the application to do the right job
regarding the way it opens/locks/saves files, but in reality not all
applications are written in a safe way to guarantee this.
Basically, my two question that I have are:
- Why did I lost bookmarks on a machine running XFS while on another one which
runs the same OS version but uses Ext3 as file system, it never happened, no
matter how many times I had to reset it.
see also http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/faq.html#nulls
- Are there any efforts currently made to increase the data integrity of XFS?
this is essentially a loss of buffered data in the VM, outside the realm
of what xfs can realistically protect. With ext3, you probably were
losing your "latest" bookmarks as well, but were luckily(?) getting back
whatever used to be on-disk.
On the other hand, there were some changes made to xfs to explicitly
sync files on close, if they have been truncated, which should help this
sort of problem. Depending on what's in OpenSuSE 10.2, that change may
or may not be in your code...
-Eric
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