XFS With Linux 6.9 Brings Online Repair Improvements

[phoronix]

Phoronix: XFS With Linux 6.9 Brings Online Repair Improvements

Joining the other file-systems seeing notable updates for Linux 6.9, the XFS file-system is seeing continued work around online repair support and other improvements...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/XFS-Linux-6.9

[hf_139]

I rather use RaiserFS than XFS

[skeevy420]

I rather use RaiserFS than XFS

He is a very bad man. He is a very very bad man.

[stiiixy]

I'm enjoying Michaels random article pictures.

[mxan]

Still no shrinking though? Lol

[NotMine999]

He is a very bad man. He is a very very bad man.

(removed image link to shorten post)

With all the recent broo-haha over bcachefs and Kent Overstreet on Phoronix, and the desire by some to stop the personal judgements (using a polite word here), you have to resort to making a clearly obvious (and totally OFFTOPIC) statement about a person rather than commenting on the technical merits of ReiserFS vs XFS.

[skeevy420]

With all the recent broo-haha over bcachefs and Kent Overstreet on Phoronix, and the desire by some to stop the personal judgements (using a polite word here), you have to resort to making a clearly obvious (and totally OFFTOPIC) statement about a person rather than commenting on the technical merits of ReiserFS vs XFS.

The XFS commits were done by a guy named Babu and the guy in the first post mentioned MurderFS. That's the joke.

Merge tag 'xfs-6.9-merge-8' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/fs/xfs/xfs-linux

Pull xfs updates from Chandan Babu:

[Vistaus]

He is a very bad man. He is a very very bad man.

Who's a bad man, Raiser? I've never heard of that guy. I think you mean Hans Reiser, but the person you quoted said RaiserFS.

[sarfarazahmad]

Still can't shrink it. Will we ever get that?

[muncrief]

I don't want to start any flame wars, so please everyone, if you care to respond to this post please do so civilly with technical observations and opinions. I'm asking this question here because of the wealth of technical knowledge and experience of the many readers and contributors at Phoronix.

My problem, and question, is a common one with a plethora of answers when searching the internet. I have a huge media server, with approximately 11 TB of data accumulated over 4 decades, and was plagued for years by silent data corruption. Though I have both local and cloud backups of everything, if an issue wasn't discovered for 2 or 3 or 4 years, or more, at times it was impossible to find and restore the uncorrupted data.

So about eight months ago I finally decided to convert all my local data filesystems to OpenZFS. My goal was simply to discover silent data corruption as quickly as possible. Repairing it isn't an issue for me because of the multiple backups, just detecting it.

And OpenZFS has worked magnificently, with one exception. Linus will simply never allow it to be incorporated into Linux so it always falls behind the latest kernel version. The claim is that its CDDL license is unacceptable, though other exceptions have been made. But there's no point in arguing about it as Linus will never change his mind.

At first I didn't think this would be an issue because most people said it would only be a few weeks behind the latest kernel, but I've found that not to be true. So trying to run a rolling distro like Arch (actually Cachyos as of a month or so ago) has become problematic. I know the simple answer is to run an LTS kernel, but as they become more and more ancient I end up missing out on a lot of kernel improvements and new features, with KVM being my primary concern.

So I've been looking into XFS more and more, but the myriads of opinions and experiences have simply left this old R&D engineer confused. And by the way I'm not interested in newer filesystems like btrfs, etc. because the problems with even mature filesystems is already enough to handle.

My worries about XFS are the claims that it is easily self corrupted by power outages, failed writes, etc., and at times this corruption cannot be detected. I'm not worried about power failures because I have multiple UPS devices for my computers, TVs, AVRs, etc. It's the other self corruption issues, and their purported undetectability, that concern me.

So what are your opinions fellow Phoronix readers? Is XFS an appropriate replacement in my situation for OpenZFS?. Keep in mind I don't have any RAID systems as in my experience they're far too expensive and complex to be worth it, and I've actually lost much more data to RAID failures than silent data corruption. So my multiple backups are sufficient. I'm also not concerned with volume management as I use mergerfs for that. I simply need a filesystem that can be installed on single disks and reliably detect silent data corruption.