New XFS Programs Update Supports New XFS On-Disk Format

[Paul-L]

1. it's only slower developed compared to EXT4 because the EXT4 has a bigger community and is considered the default FS for Linux. But, devs from XFS provide patches to EXT4 and the other way around

2. I don't visit Phoronix for benchmarks as most of the time they don't measure real-world workloads. I come here mostly for other news. I highly recommend the Dave Chinner video from 2009 (you can find it on youtube) where he explains and shows how benchmarks can be very deceiving. He compared mostly BTRFS with XFS, but it holds true for other FSes too.

3. I use both XFS and EXT4 for different reasons. When it comes to choosing an FS for a specific environment, after considering the needs, I'd suggest either XFS or EXT4 is better suited for the task. My post above might have seen as I'm biased towards XFS, but it was just a post trying to go away with some of the misconceptions about XFS

1. Changes nothing then.

2. 2009 is very far away my friend, both have been developed bastly by now.

3. both are suited for my task too, but I found in real-world workloads that ext4 does better, could be because my disk or something odd, dunno why.

[shmerl]

3. I use both XFS and EXT4 for different reasons. When it comes to choosing an FS for a specific environment, after considering the needs, I'd suggest either XFS or EXT4 is better suited for the task. My post above might have seen as I'm biased towards XFS, but it was just a post trying to go away with some of the misconceptions about XFS

What are your general guidelines about when to use either of them? What about working with advanced format drives?

I installed a new system recently (Debian testing), using a hybrid advanced format WD hard drive ("black"). I set the root (home is on the same partition) to XFS and used 4 KB sector size in mkfs.xfs since I found somewhere that it's a recommended setting for the hybrid advanced format disks which have 4 KB physical and 512 B logical sectors (and supposedly default in the newest versions mkfs.xfs). However it seems to me that reading with such setting is even slower than with my older disks (I didn't benchmark it in detail yet, just found the bonnie++ tool which I plan to use to drill down to actual performance). Any idea if what I did was correct, or setting sector size to 4 KB wasn't right?

[microchip8]

1. What I meant, slowly developed in comparison of ext4.
2. Check the benchmarks on I/O in this very site. It's not the same.
3. As a home user and hobbyst on programming, ext4 has become faster (atleast for me, obviously) dealing with my personal problems; I know that XFS is targeted to enterprise environments and that's why I like it so much, redundancy.

I meant no offense of course, just that in my point of view, patches submitted that are not merged mean nothing; and for some reason ext4 has become faster on my volumes while XFS has become slower (with some performance improvements on some kernel releases). Again, this is my personal point of view, not to say that what you written is not true for your particular enviroment.

1. it's only slower developed compared to EXT4 because the EXT4 has a bigger community and is considered the default FS for Linux. But, devs from XFS provide patches to EXT4 and the other way around

2. I don't visit Phoronix for benchmarks as most of the time they don't measure real-world workloads. I come here mostly for other news. I highly recommend the Dave Chinner video from 2009 (you can find it on youtube) where he explains and shows how benchmarks can be very deceiving. He compared mostly BTRFS with XFS, but it holds true for other FSes too.

3. I use both XFS and EXT4 for different reasons. When it comes to choosing an FS for a specific environment, after considering the needs, I'd suggest either XFS or EXT4 is better suited for the task. My post above might have seen as I'm biased towards XFS, but it was just a post trying to go away with some of the misconceptions about XFS

[shmerl]

No and no. you have to reformat the partition with the xfsutils that support the v5 format, ie by passing -m crc=1 to mkfs.xfs

Thanks.

[microchip8]

More importantly: does it shrink?

It's my most significant concern before I ever start using it again.



Once I lost over 150GB of data on RHEL 5 when I was using it (six years ago). The data was still on the disk but all its metadata magically disappeared without any interference on my part. YMMV, huh?

No, it does not shrink yet at the moment. There are patches available for that (check XFS wiki) but they're not ready yet. AFAIK, no one is working on that currently.

About the loss of data, yes XFS had problems with that back in the past. It was due to bugs which have been fixed in mid 2007. In addition, XFS tended to perform really bad when lots of metadata was involved as the journal was getting hit with only metadata and couldn't process anything else. After a few failed tries, Dave was able to significantly redesign how XFS treats metadata (he basically borrowed the concept from EXT4 as it was proven to work and there was no need to reinvent the wheel)

[Paul-L]

Not true on all counts.

1. XFS is moderately to heavily developed. Check the mailing list. Hint: at least 10 patches are posted daily
2. EXT4 has been getting slower and slower with each kernel release while XFS has stayed at its performance level (maybe too getting slightly slower but not to the same amount as EXT4)
3. XFS encourages proper programming wrt dealing with data safety instead of encouraging bad programming like EXT4 does by working around how programs that don't care much for user data store it to disk

Also XFS is really targeted at enterprise levels where redundancy is almost always present. That said, I never had problems with XFS on PC hardware

1. What I meant, slowly developed in comparison of ext4.
2. Check the benchmarks on I/O in this very site. It's not the same.
3. As a home user and hobbyst on programming, ext4 has become faster (atleast for me, obviously) dealing with my personal problems; I know that XFS is targeted to enterprise environments and that's why I like it so much, redundancy.

I meant no offense of course, just that in my point of view, patches submitted that are not merged mean nothing; and for some reason ext4 has become faster on my volumes while XFS has become slower (with some performance improvements on some kernel releases). Again, this is my personal point of view, not to say that what you written is not true for your particular enviroment.

[birdie]

More importantly: does it shrink?

It's my most significant concern before I ever start using it again.

That said, I never had problems with XFS on PC hardware

Once I lost over 150GB of data on RHEL 5 when I was using it (six years ago). The data was still on the disk but all its metadata magically disappeared without any interference on my part. YMMV, huh?

[microchip8]

As much as I like XFS, I now rarely use it for it's seemingly slow development, since ext4 has been improving and improving and being more and more both fast andreliable. Anyway it's nice to hear that improvements are still going after all.

Not true on all counts.

1. XFS is moderately to heavily developed. Check the mailing list. Hint: at least 10 patches are posted daily
2. EXT4 has been getting slower and slower with each kernel release while XFS has stayed at its performance level (maybe too getting slightly slower but not to the same amount as EXT4)
3. XFS encourages proper programming wrt dealing with data safety instead of encouraging bad programming like EXT4 does by working around how programs that don't care much for user data store it to disk

Also XFS is really targeted at enterprise levels where redundancy is almost always present. That said, I never had problems with XFS on PC hardware

[microchip8]

Are older deployments of XFS automatically upgraded to the new version when new kernel arrives, or it requires manual upgrade or not even possible?

No and no. you have to reformat the partition with the xfsutils that support the v5 format, ie by passing -m crc=1 to mkfs.xfs

[Pseus]

As much as I like XFS, I now rarely use it for it's seemingly slow development, since ext4 has been improving and improving and being more and more both fast andreliable. Anyway it's nice to hear that improvements are still going after all.

I am not so sure development has been slow. Check the mailing list.