Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (286 mails)

["Matthias G. Eckermann" <mge@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2010-08-14 T 20:41 -0400 Greg Freemyer wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 7:45 PM, Linda Walsh wrote:
>
> > Forward this from the linux-xfs list, in hoping that
> > decision-makers will consider XFS as the default suse OS
> > install choice.
>
> In the past (2.4.x kernel) XFS had significant data loss
> issues in the presence of unexpected shutdowns.

I am afraid, this sounds a bit vague: please check, if in those
cases the storage backends had been configured correctly: every
journaling filesystem will suffer from data corruption, if there
are any caches (such as disk write cache) inbetween the write
and the disk. 

This is, where barriers come in, and for consistency and data
safety I strongly recommend to not switch off barriers, even if
this might have a small performance penalty with it!

> Since desktops/laptops tend to have these much more than
> servers, I would not have wanted it to be the default at all
> during those times.

As said, this claim does not hold for well configured storage
and filesystems.

There are many people out there (including me:-) who store all
their most valuable data on XFS for many years already. And
Novell recommends XFS for (non clustered) data storage in the
Enterprise Products (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server/Desktop).
 
Considering the capabilities of current filesystems and current
development, XFS will keep and possibly extend its position for
large and super large storage for the next years.

Looking around in the Linux (Kernel) community and also in the
community of Linux distributions it seems though that btrfs has
capabilities (copy on write, data integrity, snapshots, volume
management integration), which make btrfs more suitable as the
_default_ filesystem for future Linux distributions¹.

If btrfs should be considered as the default filesystem for
openSUSE 11.4 -- this certainly depends on its maturity and its
maturation over the next 5-6 months. I personally would enjoy to
see btrfs to be default sooner than later:-)

so long -
        MgE

¹ This includes future SUSE Linux Enterprise versions;
  you may read my recent blog about this topic at:
  http://www.novell.com/communities/node/11736/data-customers-gold

-- 
Matthias G. Eckermann
Senior Product Manager - SUSE® Linux Enterprise  - Server Product Line
SUSE  LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg)
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