Best filesystems ?

[Steve Costaras]

On 2010-10-23 13:13, Peter Grandi wrote:
>
> * JFS is good for almost everything, including largish filesystems
>    on somewhat largish systems with lots of processes accessing
>    lots of files, and works equally well on 32b and 64b, is very
>    stable, and has a couple of nice features. Its major downside is
>    less care than XFS for barriers. I think that it can support
>    well filesystems up to 10-15TB, and perhaps beyond. It should
>    have been made the default for Linux for at least a decade
>    instead of 'ext3'.

Would comment here that JFS is indeed very good, but does have a problem 
when reaching/hitting the 32TB boundary.   This appears to be a user 
space tool issue.   It is the main reason why I switched over to XFS as 
was running into this problem too often.

> * XFS is like JFS, and with somewhat higher scalability both as to
>    sizes and as to higher internal parallelism in the of multiple
>    processes accessing the same file, and has a couple of nice
>    features (mostly barrier support, but also small blocks and large
>    inodes). Its major limitation are internal complexity and should
>    only be used on 64b systems. It can support single filesystems
>    larger than 10-15TB, but that's stretching things.

Have used XFS up to 120TB myself on real media (i.e. not sparse files) 
under linux; will be building >128 shortly.    Have used more w/ XFS 
Irix in the past.


Generally I find with most file  systems/tools there are many bugs when 
you cross bit boundaries where they were not tested.    Whenever 
using/planning large systems /always/ test first and  have good backups.