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Best design docs for XFS

DISCUSSION John Quigley 3 participants 5 messages Aug 10, 2009 – Aug 11, 2009

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Hey Folks:

What are the best and most current technical design documents pertaining to (Linux port of) XFS, as a companion to reading the actual code? Based upon what I've read on the community site:

http://xfs.org/index.php/XFS_Papers_and_Documentation

the most thorough technical documentation of the system lives at:

http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/design_docs/xfsdocs93_pdf/

My only concern with the above is the age - are these sufficiently up-to-date from an architecture perspective? Thanks very much.

- John Quigley

home: www.jquigley.com

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#1 lore raw
Quoted 6 lines · John Quigley

Hey Folks:

What are the best and most current technical design documents pertaining to (Linux port of) XFS, as a companion to reading the actual code? Based upon what I've read on the community site:

Quoted 8 lines

http://xfs.org/index.php/XFS_Papers_and_Documentation

the most thorough technical documentation of the system lives at:

http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/design_docs/xfsdocs93_pdf/

My only concern with the above is the age - are these sufficiently up-to-date from an architecture perspective? Thanks very much.

It's pretty good still, the fundamental design is not substantially changed; you're more likely to find missing bits than "wrong" bits I think.

http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/training/index.html

has more info as well.

-Eric

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#2 lore raw
Quoted 6 lines · Eric Sandeen

It's pretty good still, the fundamental design is not substantially changed; you're more likely to find missing bits than "wrong" bits I think.

http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/training/index.html

has more info as well.

The fundamental design is mostly unchanged. What you might now want to bother reading of the original documents are:

dir_design.pdf - the dir code has been completely replaced threads.pdf - this is totally IRIX specific
scaffold.pdf - again mostly IRIX specific
message.pdf - no idea what this is at all, I never saw traces of this in XFS

For all others there's quite a bit of IRIXism in there.

Is there anything specific you're looking for?

Quoted 7 lines

-Eric

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---end quoted text---

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#3 lore raw
Quoted 8 lines · Christoph Hellwig
Quoted 6 lines · Eric Sandeen

It's pretty good still, the fundamental design is not substantially changed; you're more likely to find missing bits than "wrong" bits I think.

http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/training/index.html

has more info as well.

Quoted 7 lines

The fundamental design is mostly unchanged. What you might now want to bother reading of the original documents are:

dir_design.pdf - the dir code has been completely replaced threads.pdf - this is totally IRIX specific
scaffold.pdf - again mostly IRIX specific
message.pdf - no idea what this is at all, I never saw traces of this in XFS

Thanks a lot guys, that helps.

Quoted 1 line

For all others there's quite a bit of IRIXism in there.

Ack.

Quoted 1 line

Is there anything specific you're looking for?

In my work, I've just begun to use XFS as the interface into a very large, virtual storage system, to great effect. It's my first direct interaction with the file system, and I've been hugely impressed with its power, speed and versatility.

The only unresolved problem that we're experiencing has to do with file system corruption in a failover scenario, and my immediate need in understanding some of the internals is to wrap my hands around this problem (I may email this list with details if I can sufficiently explain myself).

A more long-term need we have is for clustering support. I've read lightly about CXFS, though it appears to be inactive, or at least not open source. Has clustering support been discussed with the members here? If so, I'd like to take part in those conversations if there's sufficient interest to engage in that way.

Thanks very much again.

John Quigley
jquigley.com

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#4 lore raw
Quoted 1 line · John Quigley

Christoph Hellwig wrote:

...

Quoted 7 lines
Quoted 1 line

Is there anything specific you're looking for?

In my work, I've just begun to use XFS as the interface into a very large, virtual storage system, to great effect. It's my first direct interaction with the file system, and I've been hugely impressed with its power, speed and versatility.

Quoted 5 lines

The only unresolved problem that we're experiencing has to do with file system corruption in a failover scenario, and my immediate need in understanding some of the internals is to wrap my hands around this problem (I may email this list with details if I can sufficiently explain myself).

Any failover you're doing would need to be handled outside the filesystem, of course; STONITH etc? I don't know that reading xfs internals will be all that relevant.

But I suppose the details may help if you think it is an xfs-related problem.

Quoted 5 lines

A more long-term need we have is for clustering support. I've read lightly about CXFS, though it appears to be inactive, or at least not open source. Has clustering support been discussed with the members here? If so, I'd like to take part in those conversations if there's sufficient interest to engage in that way.

CXFS is and probably will be the only direct clustering mechanism for xfs... it is still active, though as you note it is not (and probably will never be?) open source.

block-layer failover should be as possible on xfs as any other filesystem, though.

-Eric

Quoted 4 lines

Thanks very much again.

John Quigley jquigley.com

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