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Data Storage Software Linux

XFS Merged into Linux 2.4 265

Posted by CmdrTaco from the journals-are-for-girls dept.
Alphix writes "As noted on KernelTrap Marcelo has merged XFS into 2.4 after a code review by Christoph Hellwig. The mail from Marcelo on LKML is here. Apparently it touched very little VFS code so people not using XFS shouldn't see any ill effects from this (it's even supposed to fix some VFS bugs). XFS is described by SGI as '...a journalling filesystem developed by SGI and used in SGI's IRIX operating system. It is now also available under GPL for linux. It is extremely scalable, using btrees extensively to support large and/or sparse files, and extremely large directories. The journalling capability means no more waiting for fsck's or worrying about meta-data corruption.' Let the stability vs. new-features flamewar begin."
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XFS Merged into Linux 2.4 More

XFS Merged into Linux 2.4

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  • ext3vs XFS? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dummkopf ( 538393 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @09:56AM (#7667673) Homepage
    back in the days when ext3 was still in our dreams i downloaded the SGI XFS kernel from their site and installed it on my wife's laptop. it was extremely stable and had the advantage, that her "oops, i have to run off and just close the lid"-atacks would not corrupt the filesystem (which i would have to clean up...).

    nowadays i use ext3 on my machines because it comes default with RH (by the way EL is now available for academia, woohoo!). hence my question:

    can someone offer a nice comparison of ext3 versus XFS?

    • Re:ext3vs XFS? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Trigun ( 685027 ) <evil@evil e m p i r e . a t h .cx> on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @10:03AM (#7667718)
      Here [zemris.fer.hr] ya go.
      • from the article:

        "Of course ext2 isn't a journaling filesystem and therefore it isn't a journaling filesystem and therefore has less advantages then xfs, jfs, reiserfs, ext3."

        you see, i just find stupid stuff like this funny and therefore i just find stupid stuff like this funny. So sue me and sue me!

      • Re:ext3vs XFS? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Merlin42 ( 148225 ) *
        in response to:
        http://aurora.zemris.fer.hr/filesystems/
        Th i s seems like a pretty poorly designed benchmark. One of the major tests was copying b/w two partitions (which is a valid test), but they put both partitions on the same disk! Whichever partition hapened to be allocated near the outside edge of the disk would have a clear advantage. Also it is not clear if the read, write, and delete portions of the test were done using the exact same partition or if some filesystems were handicapped by being on the

    • Re:ext3vs XFS? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Gudlyf ( 544445 ) <.moc.ketsilaer. .ta. .fyldug.> on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @10:04AM (#7667725) Homepage Journal
      You can always look back at this old Slashdot article [slashdot.org].

    • Re:ext3vs XFS? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by HidingMyName ( 669183 )
      Does linux have an XFS dump/restore ported to it? That makes a difference for our installation. Currently we use ext3fs so that we can dump to tape (in spite of Linus's hate for dump, the admin features of dump are very useful).

    • Re:ext3vs XFS? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mcbridematt ( 544099 )
      yeah, just hold the poweroff button :)

      For me, ext3 doesn't offer much data redundancy over plain old ext2. It still suffers from ext2's dataloss problems. Infact, with ext3, I had the horror of i/o errors. Once I had a bad powerdown, and I came close to reformatting just because it wouldn't let me into php.conf.

      Personally, anyone looking for a data-redundancy fix should use ReiserFS (which we have had for a looong time), JFS or XFS.
      • Personally, anyone looking for a data-redundancy fix should use ReiserFS (which we have had for a looong time), JFS or XFS.

        I would definatley not recommend reiserfs if you care about data. I've had atleast 2 occiasions where it lost data for no good reason. I would rather use ext2 than reiserfs any more, but when available I use XFS.

    • Re:ext3vs XFS? (Score:5, Informative)

      by _|()|\| ( 159991 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @10:16AM (#7667840)
      can someone offer a nice comparison of ext3 versus XFS?

      Ext3 can grow or shrink an unmounted file system. XFS can grow a mounted file system.

      Ext3 and XFS both have dump utilities, which many sys admins prefer for backup.

      Ext3 supports three modes of journaling: writeback (risky metadata only), ordered (metadata only), and journal (all data). I believe XFS is comparable to ordered ext3.

      Ext3 has been widely deployed on Linux, and it trivially reverts to ext2. The XFS design is mature, but its implementation on Linux is less proven.

      • Re:ext3vs XFS? (Score:3, Informative)

        by Fruit ( 31966 )
        ext2dump is unsupported; in particular I recall a quote from Linus to the extent that anyone who uses ext2dump might just as well not make backups at all.

        xfsdump on the other hand will work correctly.

      • Re:ext3vs XFS? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Nothinman ( 22765 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @10:43AM (#7668060)
        dump is not recommended with ext2 or ext3 because it opens the block device directly which bypasses the page cache and can give you corrupt data if there are dirty pages that havn't been flushed to disk.

        I'm not sure if xfsdump is any smarter about it because of the DMAPI stuff available, but I'd be carefull.
        • dump is not recommended with ext2 or ext3

          Dumping a live file system can result in bad backups. Dump is best used on an unmounted file system. It can also work well with snapshots or split mirrors.

        • Re:ext3vs XFS? (Score:3, Informative)

          by MSG ( 12810 )
          xfsdump is definitely smarter because of DMAPI, and is safe to use on live filesystems.

      • AFAIK, ext3 can't, so when you run out, you get to backup, recreate the filesystem with more, then restore.

    • Quotas! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mattbee ( 17533 )
      From what I could find out XFS is the only Linux filesystem which stores quota information as meta-data-- there's no risk of an XFS filesystem getting its quotas "out of sync" with the contents of the disc and having to run a tedious quotacheck. We recently deployed it as a backup server and it's working very well!
    • XFS journals quota info, so you won't have to
      wait for a quotacheck on a huge filesystem.

  • Benchmarks (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Space cowboy ( 13680 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @09:57AM (#7667680) Journal
    Any up-to-date comparisons between the 3 main journalling filesystems (ext3, xfs, reiserfs), for both speed and reliability ?

    I like xfs on the SGI - it's never let me down yet. I have to admit I'll be sorely tempted to try out xfs now that it's passed the 'seal-of-approval' and made it into the kernel - surely the best benchmark of all :-)

    Simon

  • Stability has been there for a long time. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @09:59AM (#7667691)
    Let the stability vs. new-features flamewar begin.

    It's already been stable for years, since VERY early in the 2.4.x cycle. It's just a detail in the naming that makes it merged as part of 2.4.x itself.

  • Careful with LILO (Score:5, Informative)

    by slashnik ( 181800 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @10:01AM (#7667701)
    Be careful those of you who still use lilo

    Q: Does LILO work with XFS?
    This depens on where you install LILO. For MBR installation: Yes. For root partitions: No, because the XFS superblock goes where LILO would be installed. This is to maintain compatibility with the Irix on-disk format. This will not be changed. Putting the Superblock on the swap partition is reported to work but not guaranteed.

    • LILO? dude, that's like, so 199^N^N^N^ er, debianish. that bacon's done moved over ages ago.

      • LILO? dude, that's like, so 199^N^N^N^ er, debianish. that bacon's done moved over ages ago.
        What else would you use? According to their website, GRUB [gnu.org] is not quite ready for public consumption yet.
    • Doesn't everyone keep a boot disk or 2 lying around?

      That simple exercise has saved me a couple of times.

    • does the same apply with grub?
      • Grub's OK

        Q: Does GRUB work with XFS?
        Yes there is native XFS filesystem support for GRUB starting with version 0.91 and up. There is a GRUB rpm that supports XFS in the download section for the 1.0.2 installer on the FTP sites.

    • Since the old days when there was a 1024 cylinder limit for the ROM BIOS and so for LILO, I usually have a very small partition (10 to 50 MBytes) somewhere in the first 1024 cylinders mounted at /boot. LILO is installed in that partition's super block, and the partition is marked active.

      So if I would use XFS for / and other partitions, I still would keep that trusted little helper /boot partition with an ext2/ext3/minix/whatever filesystem that works with LILO.

      Minor drawback: You have to uncomment export

  • An Overview (Score:5, Informative)

    by Gudlyf ( 544445 ) <.moc.ketsilaer. .ta. .fyldug.> on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @10:02AM (#7667707) Homepage Journal
    SGI has an overview on the XFS filesystem [sgi.com], just briefly pointing out some highlights. I also recall reading somewhere that it was possible (moreso than ext* filesystems) to undelete files on an XFS filesystem, although I'm skeptical.

    • Re:An Overview (Score:3, Informative)

      by Fruit ( 31966 )
      No. That is wrong. It's usually *harder* to retrieve a deleted file from an XFS filesystem than from ext2/ext3, not in the first place because the on-disk structures are more complicated.

  • Comparison (Score:5, Informative)

    by Alphix ( 33559 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @10:04AM (#7667727) Homepage
    For all those that are looking for a filesystem comparison, I found this story [kerneltrap.org] to be quite interesting...or go here [netnation.com] for the test details and results.

  • XFS Rocks (Score:5, Informative)

    by fmlug.org ( 695374 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @10:04AM (#7667732) Homepage
    I use XFS on serveral different servers, mainly because I belive it performs better then ext3, or any other fs. Also because Alot of the servers I run are samba servers and the ACL support is built native into XFS. And last I looked ACL support was still not quite stable in ext2/3 it has been awhile so it could be stable by now.

    • Re:XFS Rocks (Score:2, Informative)

      by oracleofbargth ( 16602 )
      And last I looked ACL support was still not quite stable in ext2/3 it has been awhile so it could be stable by now.

      As of the patch for kernels 2.4.19+, acl support is very stable for ext[23]. In fact, I've been using it in production for over 2 years now. (I did help write some of the ext3-xattr+acl code, though, so maybe that means I'm a little bit more trusting of the code.)

      The only big issues I've ever had is when using them in conjunction with quotas, but even when stress testing the filesystem, I

  • I love XFS (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Apreche ( 239272 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @10:06AM (#7667752) Homepage Journal
    Back in the day I would always just use ext2. Then I realized, hey there are other filesystems to choose from, so I decided to shoot in the dark and try reiser and xfs and ext3. xfs has always been the most awesome.

    Just one thing. Now that we've got the source code for dealing with xfs, can someone write a driver so I can mount my xfs partitions from windows xp? It would really help out a lot of us dual booting types. I would do it myself, but I don't know jack about how filesystems work. I just know which ones do what.

    I hope they put the xfs into 2.6 also. Maybe it wont be necessary to have seperate xfs-sources in gentoo anymore and xfs will finally be included in the gentoo-sources.

    • Re:I love XFS (Score:3, Informative)

      by kill-1 ( 36256 )
      XFS has been in 2.6 for a long time. It was merged early during the 2.5 development cycle.
    • Maybe it wont be necessary to have seperate xfs-sources in gentoo anymore and xfs will finally be included in the gentoo-sources.

      Well, yeah, that's pretty much the gist of merging features into the kernel - distro maintainers don't have to patch them separately.

      • Obviously haven't seen the patchset for gentoo-sources (if you don't want patches, in gentoo look at vanilla-sources (2.4) or development-sources(2.6))

        I was going to paste a selection, but given that it seems to be ~250patches, I will just note that it's a LOT of patches :)

  • its about time (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Buckwheatz_tm ( 706267 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @10:07AM (#7667759)
    I have been using it for for almost 3 years now. It has never let me down unlike some of the other journaling filesystems. No corrupt superblock like jfs. Kinda slow for small files when the parttions reach around 80% full. Plus its sure to piss SCO off :) but for video editing or files over 100kb it can't be beat. Reiserfs is great for directories like /var since 2.4.18 but I have lost too much data in the past to the bugger.

    • SCO (Score:5, Informative)

      by einhverfr ( 238914 ) <chris...travers@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @11:16AM (#7668378) Homepage Journal
      Plus its sure to piss SCO off :)

      That is not the half of it. You see-- Hellwig is a former SCO employee who when he worked there, worked with IBM closely on their port of JFS to Linux. He was also heavily involved in the SMP development process too. Just do a search for his name and SCO and Caldera on your favorite search engine. I think it will be hard for him to avoid a deposition ;-)

      Now he works for SGI.

  • Why so much fuss over JFS? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @10:07AM (#7667760)
    Just wondering, why does everyone get so excited about journaling filesystems? Many distros default to ext3/reiserfs now for even home boxes, but it's like a big band-aid.

    If your box is crashing enough to make fscking a chore, you already have bigger problems. Sure, I can see where JFSs are sometimes useful, but on dekstops and most other machines the better-performing ext2 is a much more appropriate choice.
    • I never find fscking a chore!

      Quite the opposite in fact . . .

      . . . we're talking about different things here, aren't we?
    • It's not always crashing that's the problem, power failures are another (UPSs can cover that, but...). Also, component failures can often result in a crash.

      In any case, when you have 500GB of filesystems, you really don't want to fsck that if a CPU fails.

    • Re:Why so much fuss over JFS? (Score:4, Informative)

      by virtual_mps ( 62997 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @10:44AM (#7668072)
      Well, one of your mistakes is assuming that the non-journalling fs will be faster. XFS will wipe the floor with ext2 on certain workloads. The other is assuming that it takes a number of crashes to make fscking a problem. A single fsck on a large filesystem could take upwards of an hour.
    • It's based on the value of your data.

      if you are running a single IDE drive, then your data is not worth much. SCSI = worth a bit more... SCSI raid 5 with 4 drives and a journaling filesystem = worth alot more.

      then we get to the level of hotplug scsi drives with tons of redundancy hardware raid 5 (works awesome with linux) and a real tape backup system (DLT) means your data is actually valuable....

      and we can go up from there to extreme redundancy and data safety.

      JFS = cheap security for valuable data...
    • In this case journaling is only one of the main features of the filesystem. XFS is much faster than ext3, supports logging to a seperate device to speed it up even more, nicely supports huge filesystems and file sizes and has much nicer userland tools.

  • We've just begun (Score:3, Interesting)

    by fserb ( 264517 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @10:07AM (#7667764) Homepage
    I agree with Marcelo's action on this. We're still in a very early stage of the 2.6 (stable) branch to feature freeze 2.4.

    I know we need the maximum user base for 2.6 testing, debugging and to recieve those "My TV stopped working when I installed kernel 2.6" messages. But we have to take it easy.

    2.6 rocks. And a lot of distros have plans to release 2.6 based releases in the first quarter of 2004, which will greatly improve the user base.

    IMHO, a good feature freeze, as Marcelo said somewhere in LKML, is 2.4.24 or even 2.4.25.

    It's no time for a flamewar to begin. The Beaver is in the building. :)

  • I wonder (Score:2, Funny)

    by AndyFewt ( 694753 ) *
    .. what SCO will have to say about this...

  • Patch size. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rf0 ( 159958 ) * <rghf@fsck.me.uk> on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @10:10AM (#7667784) Homepage
    Fun for the whole family with guess where the patch was applied From the snapshot directory [kernel.org]

    bk6 - 424K

    bk7 - 964k

    bk8 - 1.2M

    Well thats increased the kernel by about another 5-10%. However I would say I do like xfs and its proven quite stable now.

    Rus

  • Christoph Hellwig, former SCO (Caldera)! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by infolib ( 618234 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @10:10AM (#7667787)
    after a code review by Christoph Hellwig

    Incidentally, this is the Christoph Hellwig who contributed code to the kernel on Calderas behalf. [groklaw.net] His contributions may become an important point in the SCO-IBM-RedHat battle.

  • YEAH, WOO HOOO - ALRIGHT! (Score:5, Informative)

    by cluge ( 114877 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @10:11AM (#7667794) Homepage
    After patching every single kernel thats come out since the early 2.4s, I now have a kernel that I don't need to patch. WOW, about darn time!! Perhaps I'll even get lucky enough that RedHat and others that do not support XFS yet will build it into their kernels. That will make MY life easier, and updates go faster.

    We chose XFS after lots of serious testing. It beat all comers at the time and we've been using it ever since. The only downside to XFS is file deletion times are a bit long, especially compared to Reiser, but when you have a server that is uner HEAVY load (Databses, mail servers) and with LARGE files (log server) nothing beats XFS.

    Thanks guys, this is one of those merges that has made me estatic!

    Angry People Rule [angrypeoplerule.com]

    • Re: FINALLY! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by jbeamon ( 208826 )
      I've been patching XFS support into my distro for a few months now. Let me get you caught up briefly. We had ext3 patched with acl support. That patch tends to lag behind kernel versions a little, which is not a problem if you're running a distro's standard back-ported kernel. However, I just undertook a migration on a live production box from ext3+acl to XFS on a second attached disk array, so I've been in Patch Hell for the last few weeks. I will say up front that I am not a k3rn31 h4ck0rz, but I get
    • How does it compare with JFS?

  • No Complaints (Score:5, Informative)

    by LightForce3 ( 450105 ) <lightforce3@[ ]oo.com ['yah' in gap]> on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @10:12AM (#7667803) Homepage
    Mandrake has offered XFS since at least 9.0, my first Linux distro. I've been using XFS (at the suggestion of my friend who helped with the install) for at least 6 months now, with only instance of a problem (not sure if it was a fault in the filesystem itself): lost or corrupted an inode or two, and fixed very easily once I knew what to do.

    It works with both GRUB and LILO, is reasonably speedy, and has enormous partition and file size limits.

    Count me a happy customer.

    ~~LF

  • Oddly Enough (Score:5, Interesting)

    by thesolo ( 131008 ) <slap@fighttheriaa.org> on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @10:16AM (#7667839) Homepage
    This was just mentioned here on /. the other day, but according to this article on Groklaw [groklaw.net], Christoph Hellwig is (was?) a Caldera (SCO) employee.

    SCO is going after SGI for XFS [linuxworld.com], when one of their own employees was working on it.

  • Finally (Score:3, Interesting)

    by LynXmaN ( 4317 ) * on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @10:18AM (#7667856) Homepage
    I've been using XFS in production servers for more than two years already without any problem, it was time that it was merged into 2.4 kernel...

    Maybe this way RedHat begins to support it for their installations

  • Journals are for girls? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dynastar454 ( 174232 ) * on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @10:26AM (#7667911) Homepage Journal
    from the journals-are-for-girls dept.

    Huh? I always thought it was diaries that were for girls... at least, that's what I told my friends when they made fun of my journal. :-)

  • Bechmarks (Score:4, Informative)

    by kompiluj ( 677438 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @10:41AM (#7668043)
    You can find the benchmarks on:
    http://epoxy.mrs.umn.edu/~minerg/fstests/results.h tml [umn.edu], or a copy at: ReiserFS homepage [namesys.com].
    Of course your mileage may vary but I generally got results consistent with those cited.
    My own experiences (I have used both reiserfs and xfs with 2.4.20 kernel:
    • reiserfs is a little bit faster than xfs
    • xfs gives you 2 times bigger CPU usage than reiserfs
    • both are still much better than jfs
    • the reliability of both xfs and reiserfs is satisfactory
    • the results are still order of magnitude worse than those I get with UFS2 with softupdates on FreeBSD 5.1

    • Re:Bechmarks (Score:2, Informative)

      by Pow.R Toc.H ( 12470 )
      These benchmarks have been run with Reiser 4 which, AFAIK, is not shipped by default with no Linux distribution. Even Mandrake guys, who are fond of experimental software on their distributions hasn't included Reiser 4 on Mdk9.2. Most distributions include 3.6.28, IINM.

      OTOH, I've been using XFS to store and edit 36-bit film scans (40+ MB file sizes) and XFS has been serving me extremely well, without data corruption of any kind - differently from Reiser 3, which needs a reiserfsck every time I boot Win2k

  • A few other nice XFS features (Score:5, Informative)

    by isoga ( 670113 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @11:01AM (#7668239) Journal
    ...no one has mentioned yet:
    (from http://www.sgi.com/software/xfs/overview.html)

    Guaranteed Rate I/O
    XFS is the only file system available that provides a guaranteed rate I/O system, which allows applications to reserve specific bandwidth to or from the file system. The file system can determine the available bandwidth and guarantee that a requested level of performance is met for a given time. This functionality is critical for media delivery systems such as video-on-demand or data acquisition.

    Expanded Dump Capabilities
    Unlike traditional file systems, which must be dismounted to guarantee a consistent dump image, you can dump an XFS file system while it is being used. The XFS dump utility, XFSdump, can dump an entire filesystem, a directory tree, or specific files. XFSdump is restartable, which allows a large dump to be spread over an extended period of time or to be resumed after a system restart.

    -->tech stuff [homelinux.net]

  • I happened to stumble on the thread while browsing the lkml a while ago.. I noticed that someone from Fermilab tossed in their support for merging it, as they run a 300TB or so setup. You think, maybe, this has something to do with it?

    On a different note, I've been running XFS on my 2.6.0-test box for a while.. Now that it's going to be in a stable kernel, I can't wait to back up everything and switch. =D

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