XFS File-System Maintainer Stepping Down
XFS File-System Maintainer Stepping Down
Reviewing has become a nightmare of sifting through under-documented kernel code trying to decide if this new feature won't break all the other features. Getting reviews is an unpleasant process of negotiating with demands for further cleanups, trying to figure out if a review comment is based in experience or unfamiliarity, and wondering if the silence means anything.Damn I feel that
Darrick nominated Chandan Babu of Oracle to handle release management for XFS
Oracle? 🤨 Oh boy...
As much as I despise Oracle and the lawn mower man known as Larry Ellison, I don't think this is a problem. Oracle also had a lot to do with btrfs, and while that filesystem has problems, they're not the sort of problems usually associated with Oracle (i.e. rapacious capitalistic practices like patent trolling and suing the fuck out of everyone all the time always). Oracle won't own XFS, it's owned by every single person who has ever contributed to that codebase.
The Linux team at Oracle are ok I think. Based on the blog post they made about the Red Hat debacle. Sounds like they are true Linux guys so it should be ok
Serious question: why would anyone opt for XFS these days? I remember reading about it being faster/more efficient with small files, but is that still valid?
XFS has been the default file system for RHEL since RHEL 7. A lot of places typically roll with defaults there, so it makes sense to see it still widely used.
The RHEL (and Fedora) defaults are quite good, too.
Xfs is basically a bigger, better ext4.
It has more features but it also isn't as weird and wacky as btrfs and zfs.
Honestly I'm not sure it shouldn't be the default fs for most distros, except it wasn't born in the Linux kernel like ext and btrfs, but it's been here forever and it's been very well behaved, unlike others I can mention.
Used it for a while on lvm raid, xfs was never what gave me problems.
XFS is rock solid and still has active development going on, so why not.
Rock solid may be a stretch. They still suffer from outrageous metadata bugs even to this day when used in busy file systems.
That bug alone has been open for over a decade. Development focus of the people who understand and want to fix those things have shifted to other filesystems like ext4 and ZFS.
I'll give you one reason it's used commercially: Veeam can only use xfs or refs as a deduplication enabled store using fastclone. For example I have a 60 disk nas hosting hundreds of customer backups and a petabyte. Without deduplication imagine how many extra petabytes of storage would be consumed. Each backup is basically the same image as well as the backup processing time.
Maybe they'll get that same feature on zfs one day.
Unless you want me to use refs? But I have tried that, and I've lost a whole volume to iscsi volume mounted to windows and formatted refs due to corruption when a network power loss happened gradually and whatever reason, that network interruption caused the whole volume to be unmountable over iscsi ever again. I'm not keen to retry that.
Xfs is pretty good with 60 disks, I wouldn't trust ext4 with that many but there's nothing factual about ext4 but a feeling.
About to get a second 60 disk nas for another datacentre for the same setup as above to migrate away from Wasabi as offsite. Will build xfs again. Looking forward to it.
I am pretty sure certain apps want xfs. One I can think of is veeam who leverage their block cloning feature for some of their stuff.
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To me, zfs is like the Gentoo of file systems. If you actually use the zfs features and do a lot of digging and experimentation before you go all in on it, it’s not bad; it really can be quite good. If someone wants a filesystem that they format and forget, ext4 and xfs are still solid options. I used to use ext4 for most of my filesystem needs and xfs for my long term storage on top of mdadm. I just really wanted zfs snapshots.