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From: Mark Allums on 26 Apr 2010 04:20 On 4/26/2010 2:14 AM, Stan Hoeppner wrote: > I'd also guess that XFS seems "new" to a lot of people because it's never > been the default filesystem for any major Linux distro on i386/AMD64. I wonder why. _____________ Older is not better. MAA -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST(a)lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster(a)lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4BD54A43.4050109(a)allums.com
From: Mark Allums on 26 Apr 2010 04:20 On 4/26/2010 2:14 AM, Stan Hoeppner wrote: > XFS has had just as much development support in Linux as EXT3/4 have, > possibly more in some areas. What does this prove? Development does not equal support. MAA -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST(a)lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster(a)lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4BD54A7F.5010908(a)allums.com
From: Stan Hoeppner on 26 Apr 2010 04:30 Ron Johnson put forth on 4/26/2010 2:37 AM: > On 04/26/2010 02:14 AM, Stan Hoeppner wrote: >> Mark Allums put forth on 4/25/2010 1:19 AM: >> >>> (Why? ext3 and 4 are exceptionally well supported by Linux and GNU. XFS >>> will be, too, probably.) >> >> Are you kidding? XFS already is all of the things you mention. You >> apparently need a history lesson. >> >> XFS went into production systems starting in 1993 on SGI's Indy >> workstations. XFS was GPL'd by SGI in 2000, and was in Linux mainline >> just >> before EXT3, since mid 2001 in kernel 2.4. It was used almost >> exclusively >> on the IA64 Altix machines. It took a while before non SGI customers >> starting trying out XFS on i386 hardware. > [snip] > > They couldn't have directly take the Irix code and brought it directly > to Linux. It just wouldn't work, and Linus wouldn't allow such shimmed > code into the mainline. > > So, while there's an XFS which is 17 years old, the Linux xfs code is > "only" 9-10 years old. Absolutely correct. I wasn't trying to imply the same exact code has been around for 17 years. Hell if that was the case I wouldn't be using it. Whilst the initial Linux porting effort was more than a simple recompile, I don't believe it was a herculanean effort. Far more changes to the XFS code have been made since inclusion in mainline than the changes required to get from IRIX to Linux. I actually saw a brief video interview of one of the SGI IRIX devs quite some time ago in which he described the initial Linux port effort to get it running on SGI's big Origin 3000 MIPS machines. They had to do this to start validating how everything would run under Linux because they didn't have the first Itanium Altix systems manufactured yet. IIRC their testbed was a 32 processor Origin 3000 running MIPS R14K processors. This was back before the Linux MIPS port project existed so they were in essence creating the first Linux MIPS port as part of their effort. He clearly stated that developing/maintaining a Linux MIPS port was not in the cards for SGI, that this effort was strictly a validation effort. He said it took about a week to get Linux booting on the Origin system, and another week to get it stable. The first XFS port to Linux was part of this effort. If it took only 2 weeks for the bulk of this effort, I can't imagine they had to modify a ton of XFS code. IRIX was written in C as is Linux, so the changes in XFS were probably fairly minor. I'd venture to guess that the most significant Linux XFS changes were those for the 32bit X86 code base. IRIX and thus XFS were born on 64bit MIPS RISC CPUs. Moving that to a Linux 64bit Itanium environment was probably relatively straight forward. Moving down to a 32bit platform probably required a lot of code changes, as did the initial Linux 64bit ports up to Alpha, HPPA, Itanium, and eventually MIPS64. -- Stan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST(a)lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster(a)lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4BD54DE6.9060605(a)hardwarefreak.com
From: Mark Allums on 26 Apr 2010 04:30 On 4/26/2010 2:14 AM, Stan Hoeppner wrote: > Mark Allums put forth on 4/25/2010 1:19 AM: Sorry Stan, Your defense of XFS has put me into troll mode. It's a reflex. I don't buy it, but I shouldn't troll. I think you are confusing what is with what should be. MAA -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST(a)lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster(a)lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4BD54D42.3030701(a)allums.com
From: Stan Hoeppner on 26 Apr 2010 05:10
Mark Allums put forth on 4/26/2010 3:10 AM: > On 4/26/2010 2:14 AM, Stan Hoeppner wrote: > >> XFS has had just as much development support in Linux as EXT3/4 have, >> possibly more in some areas. > > What does this prove? Development does not equal support. I thought you were talking about developer support, as in XFS devs getting support from other kernel devs and/or support directly from Linus and/or Alan. I've seen posts on the xfs mailing list from both Linus and Alan. XFS is very much a mainline supported filessytem. Don't forget there are a few companies who _require_ XFS to work well on Linux. If you're talking about end user support, the XFS mailing list members, whilst mostly engaged in dev stuff, are very gracious with helping XFS end users who are having problems. As far as getting help with an XFS problem here on debian-user, of course you're possibly SOL. From what I've seen, most of the OPs on debian-user are desktop or mobile users, not server OPs. Of the server OPs on here, most aren't dealing with multi-hundred terabyte filesystems on big FC SAN storage that need the massive throughput and the backup, restore, freeze to snapshot, and other features of XFS. I'd venture to guess that most of the systems using XFS around the world are running SLES just because of the vendor support deals. SLES ships on SGI's machines which use XFS by default. IBM bundles SLES on many of its X86 and Power machines, as well as on zSeries as a VM. There's plenty of hardware vendor and OS vendor support for XFS if you buy one of these machines and use SLES. I freely admit that XFS penetration in the Debian world, or any other non-big-vendor backed Linux, is going to be sparse. The need that would drive XFS adoption just doesn't exist for the hobbyist or average Debian server OP. The other available filesystems mostly meet their needs. XFS does have many features/advantages that could benefit many Debian systems. But, yes, the OP wouldn't likely get help for it here. That said, I can't recall too many emergency cries here for help with any filesystem problem. -- Stan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST(a)lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster(a)lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4BD55670.3050208(a)hardwarefreak.com |