inode64 readiness testing

[Peter Kimball]

Hi folks,

We've got some large XFS volumes that should probably be using the inode64 mount option, but aren't yet.  Before I go making irrevocable changes, I wanted to run my testing procedure by you to make sure I've actually tested what I think I tested.  These volumes will be shared via NFS, which is not your problem but seems to be a troublemaker.

I created a blank 1GB disk image, created an XFS filesystem on that image, and mounted it on a loopback device using the ino64 flag.  

I wrote a bunch of data to the filesystem (lots of small files), approximately 600MB.

At this point, I think I have a filesystem in which inodes use 64-bit addresses, even if the actual address value would fit in 32 bits.  I would expect any program that can't handle 64-bit addresses to barf when trying to access any data on the filesystem.

I then unmounted the filesystem and re-mounted it using the inode64 flag, just like it would be mounted in production.

I then verified that the programs I cared about (mostly NFS clients) could read all of the data I had written.  I also made sure they could write to the filesystem.

Since I haven't seen any read/write failures at this point, I feel I'm ready to sign off that we're ready to start using the inode64 flag.  Did I properly create files using 64-bit inodes?  Did I read from the filesystem in such a way that I would know if my readers were unable to handle 64-bit inodes?  Is there anything I should test that I haven't?

Thanks for all your hard work on this most useful project!
Peter



ps: not sure it makes a difference, this is on Centos 5.3 (2.6.18-128.el5), so I'm not entirely certain which XFS bugs/features have been folded in by the maintainers...