[NTLUG:Discuss] [Bulk] Re: ext3 waste disk spaces then Windows ME?

[Robert Pearson]

On 4/30/06, David Stanaway <david at stanaway.net> wrote:
> Chris Cox wrote:
> > At the time I did my work comparing them, XFS wasn't quite baked yet
> > (had some issues).  XFS has always been the filesystem to wait for...
> > and now that it is here, perhaps it is an excellent choice.
> >
> > Btw, my findings agree with the findings in the article with regards
> > to the low CPU utilization characteristics of JFS.  We went with
> > reiserfs because it was it was very fast on some operations and not
> > terribly far off the mark on others, and what we really liked was
> > the ability to resize filesystems on the fly (while still mounted).
> > Which at the time we did our tests, only reiserfs could do this.
>
> xfs does that too. It is a great compliment to lvm2.

Just an FYI...
According to both "LVM HOWTo and the "OSS SGI Project"
LVM cannot shrink an XFS Filesystem.
"LVM HOWTO" says LVM cannot shrink a JFS Filesystem.

<<http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/reducelv.html>>

<<http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/faq.html#resize>>

These may be important considerations for an environment.
They can all be expanded.

> One more serious that had occurred with xfs in the past was a bug with
> stale block data after the end of the used portion being seen when a
> file was read with memory mapped IO as occurs with gcc for instance.

The OSS SGI site reports some bug fixes---

<<http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/index.html>>

Notice the copyright expires in, or at the end of, 2006.

While I love XFS and believe it is a fine filesystem, it is the
fastest one I ever benchmarked, I would wonder about
future SGI support.
SGI needs XFS for their HPC boxes they sell the Government,
and Big Oil, but they are a company living on borrowed time.
If Red Hat had not picked up GFS one of the best filesystems
for Storage Management would have disappeared. GFS is the
only filesystem I ever saw that was Storage Centric and Storage
Aware. I have given up waiting for those features to appear in
any other filesystem.
There is a case to be made for "the way things are".
Give people the fastest filesystem you can and let them make
it do what they want. XFS is fun to customize.

IMHO
These considerations only apply at the Enterprise. With some
trickle-down to SMB environments. At the Personal Computing,
SOHO and low-end SMB you are free to be creative.