XFS File-System With Linux 5.10 Punts Year 2038 Problem To The Year 2486

[juarezr]

I have seen good comments regarding this filesystem and also the skill of its developers.

Does anyone know how it compares with other Linux filesystems when used in a personal Desktop/Workstation use case?

[Zan Lynx]

Out of pure curiosity, are nanoseconds really needed? Why microseconds aren't enough?

Nanoseconds are barely enough. It is very important for build dependency tools like Make or Ninja that file times clearly show when a file was created after its source file. Otherwise files either don't get rebuilt when needed, or files are rebuilt when they don't need to be.

This isn't a real problem with complex builds which might take half a second to produce the output but every build also contains some small files which are essentially just copied into the output. A cached RAM to RAM file copy can be done in a few nanoseconds especially once NVDIMM storage gets involved.

[skeevy420]

And then engineers forgot out the hardlimit on the date which led to a bug allowing da Vinci to become evil and acquire the holo emitter to escape the holo deck and start the Hologram Wars with all the EMH Mk 1s retired into labor.

[CommunityMember]

Is this a backward compatible change or does it require reformatting?

As I recall, the stated plan was that it will not require a reformat, just a change to the on-disk filesystem capabilities to upgrade to the new feature (using one/more of the tools from the xfsprogs utilities). That is not exactly backwardly compatible (old kernels without support for the new (bigtime) filesystem format will not support such filesystems after that capability is enabled, and as I recall a filesystem once bigtime is enabled cannot be downgraded to pre-bigtime), but it will allow one to transition a filesystem in place once you have the appropriate kernel support and no longer need to be able to mount the filesystem on older systems.

[bobbie424242]

Would have liked year 80486 for trolling Intel...

[ssokolow]

We need a file system that can count at least 10,000 years and a billion tears.

I remember reading that, when they moved from 68k to PPC, Apple upped the date limit from 2040 to 29,940.

[JackLilhammers]

Note: The upper limit is 2486 (and not 2554) because the XFS timestamp epoch still starts in December 1901 (aka ~2 billion seconds before 1970). I hope we're not still using XFS in the 25th century.

I wanted to stretch it to 2525 just so I could sing "In the year 2525, if man is still alive, and XFS can survive..." but nobody thought it was acceptable to lose support for timestamps that worked on the old filesystems just for the sake of a song. (Myself included.)

I mean, if you designed your fs so that the timestamp epoch started the day that song came out, you actually /can/ get to 2525 with a 64-bit nanosecond counter. :P

Out of pure curiosity, are nanoseconds really needed? Why microseconds aren't enough?

[jacob]

Is this a backward compatible change or does it require reformatting?

[jaxa]

We need a file system that can count at least 10,000 years and a billion tears.

[cen1]

Leave it to developers to make sure they have some more work to do later..