[SAC] [Fwd: [support.osuosl.org #11303] OSGeos New Servers]

[Alex Mandel]

Martin Spott wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 06:18:09PM -0700, Alex Mandel wrote:
> 
>> One note, we had to go with ext3 instead of ext4 because the current
>> Debian Stable kernels don't support ext4 well. We may want to consider a
>> different version of Debian/Ubuntu for the download mirror later on to
>> take advantage of the speed increase of ext4 (I've heard it rivals XFS)
> 
> I wonder why we then didn't go for XFS right from the beginning, if XFS
> is the reference anyway !?
> 
> Cheers,
> 	Martin.

XFS has been the benchmark for speed (On large files afaik, not lots of
small files), but from what I've read ext is considered safer in the
event of power loss etc. ext4 seems to combine the specs of both. I know
XFS can't shrink, but I guess that's unlikely to be an issue for us. So
the only other question is if OSL's tools and setup supports XFS. I'm
also unsure if XFS requires tweaking to achieve it performance, so
familiarity may be a factor here.

There must be some reason why most Linux distros have not made it their
default filesystem. Ah trolling around it actually looks like
historically Redhat/Centos line didn't include XFS in it's
kernels(supposedly added in 5.4, I think that's their latest version).

I really had only been thinking about XFS when dealing with the download
mirror where we could potentially have lots of 4 GB iso images of the
Live DVD/Virtual Machines. There doesn't seem to be any reason to use it
for anything else. ext4 however is soon to be the standard default for
more distros and by moving now we could start taking advantage of
performance over ext3 while still expecting it and it's tools to be the
same for the most part.

Thanks,
Alex

(Anyone on the list used XFS before, I've read about it plenty but never
used it)