XFS in the main kernel
Linus, et al.
I know it's been discussed to death, but I am making a formal request to you to include XFS in the main kernel. We (The Sloan Digital Sky Survey) and many, many other groups here at Fermilab would be very happy to have this in the main tree.
Currently the SDSS has ~20TB of XFS filesystems, most of which is in our 14 fileservers and database machines. The D-Zero experiment has ~140 desktops running XFS and several XFS fileservers. We've been using it since it was released, and have found it to be very reliable.
I'll even attempt to bribe you with homebrew beer - would that help?? ;-)
Thanks,
Dan
Signature · 4 lines
Dan Yocum Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Fermilab 630.840.6509 [email protected], http://www.sdss.org SDSS. Mapping the Universe.
Quoted 4 lines · Dan Yocum
I know it's been discussed to death, but I am making a formal request to you to include XFS in the main kernel. We (The Sloan Digital Sky Survey) and many, many other groups here at Fermilab would be very happy to have this in the main tree.
The issue is how XFS's private versions of what would normally be generic vfs facilities fit with the rest of the kernel. Want to help in the analysis? Feel free to jump in.
Quoted 6 lines
Currently the SDSS has ~20TB of XFS filesystems, most of which is in our 14 fileservers and database machines. The D-Zero experiment has ~140 desktops running XFS and several XFS fileservers. We've been using it since it was released, and have found it to be very reliable.
I'll even attempt to bribe you with homebrew beer - would that help?? ;-)
Programmer cycles would help. Oh, you can offer $$$ to certain kernel hackers if you want it to go faster. Not to engage in advocacy of course, but to do the necessary analysis.
Signature · 1 line
Daniel
In article <[email protected]>,
Quoted 4 lines · Dan Yocum
I know it's been discussed to death, but I am making a formal request to you to include XFS in the main kernel. We (The Sloan Digital Sky Survey) and many, many other groups here at Fermilab would be very happy to have this in the main tree.
Has XFS been proven to be completely stable and POSIX complient in its behaviour? The reason I am asking is that XFS seems to be a fairly common factor for segfault bugreports in dpkg. The problems are rare enough (and never reproducable) so I can't prove this but it does leave me wondering.
Wichert.
Signature · 4 lines
_________________________________________________________________ / Nothing is fool-proof to a sufficiently talented fool \ | [email protected] http://www.liacs.nl/~wichert/ | | 1024D/2FA3BC2D 576E 100B 518D 2F16 36B0 2805 3CB8 9250 2FA3 BC2D |
Quoted 8 lines · On 22 Apr 2002 18:55:20 +0200, [email protected] (Wichert Akkerman) wrote:
In article <[email protected]>,
Quoted 4 lines · Dan Yocum
I know it's been discussed to death, but I am making a formal request to you to include XFS in the main kernel. We (The Sloan Digital Sky Survey) and many, many other groups here at Fermilab would be very happy to have this in the main tree.
Has XFS been proven to be completely stable
As much as any other filesystem. "There are no bugs in filesystem XYZ. That just means that you have not looked hard enough." :) There is a daily QA suite that XFS is run through.
Quoted 2 lines
The reason I am asking is that XFS seems to be a fairly common factor for segfault bugreports in dpkg.
dpkg uses mmap? There was a bug in XFS and mmapped files where incorrect blocks were flushed to disk under high load, but that was fixed around January 30.
--
Not speaking for sgi.
Quoted 9 lines · Keith Owens
Quoted 7 lines · On 22 Apr 2002 18:55:20 +0200, [email protected] (Wichert Akkerman) wrote:
In article <[email protected]>,
Quoted 4 lines · Dan Yocum
I know it's been discussed to death, but I am making a formal request to you to include XFS in the main kernel. We (The Sloan Digital Sky Survey) and many, many other groups here at Fermilab would be very happy to have this in the main tree.
Quoted 5 lines
Quoted 1 line
Has XFS been proven to be completely stable
As much as any other filesystem. "There are no bugs in filesystem XYZ. That just means that you have not looked hard enough." :) There is a daily QA suite that XFS is run through.
In the reality the inclusion on XFS in the 2.5 tree would probably move more peole to use it, and so also to eventually trigger bugs, to report them, sometimes to fix them.
This way XFS would improve faster, and of course that would be a good thing.
That said, it is important to
consider the technical reasons to include XFS in 2.5 or not; if this inclusion could cause some troubles, if XFS fits the requirements Linus asks for the inclusion and what impact the inclusion would have on the kernel (Think to JFS as a good example of an easy inclusion, with low impact).
Luigi
Quoted 1 line · Previously Keith Owens
dpkg uses mmap?
To read all its data files, just.
Quoted 2 lines
There was a bug in XFS and mmapped files where incorrect blocks were flushed to disk under high load, but that was fixed around January 30.
That would produce corrupt files which does not seem to be the case. If memory serves me corrrectly one of the problems was that rename(2) returned an error in rare cases that should not be possible (might have been ENOENT even though both we have verified in advance that can't be true).
Wichert
Signature · 4 lines
_________________________________________________________________ /[email protected] This space intentionally left occupied \ | [email protected] http://www.liacs.nl/~wichert/ | | 1024D/2FA3BC2D 576E 100B 518D 2F16 36B0 2805 3CB8 9250 2FA3 BC2D |
Quoted 11 lines · Wichert Akkerman
In article <[email protected]>,
Quoted 4 lines · Dan Yocum
I know it's been discussed to death, but I am making a formal request to you to include XFS in the main kernel. We (The Sloan Digital Sky Survey) and many, many other groups here at Fermilab would be very happy to have this in the main tree.
Has XFS been proven to be completely stable and POSIX complient in its behaviour? The reason I am asking is that XFS seems to be a fairly common factor for segfault bugreports in dpkg. The problems are rare enough (and never reproducable) so I can't prove this but it does leave me wondering.
Is there a test suite that checks POSIX (or better yet, SUS v3) compliance of a file system? That might prove useful, although I'm well aware it'd probably require some brains (and kernel modules) to check consistency guarantees. But apart from that, things like "truncate to zero length does not change the mtime of a file" (fixed in ReiserFS only some weeks ago) might get caught that way.
Quoted 6 lines · Matthias Andree
Is there a test suite that checks POSIX (or better yet, SUS v3) compliance of a file system? That might prove useful, although I'm well aware it'd probably require some brains (and kernel modules) to check consistency guarantees. But apart from that, things like "truncate to zero length does not change the mtime of a file" (fixed in ReiserFS only some weeks ago) might get caught that way.
ftp://ftp.freestandards.org/pub/lsb/test_suites/
-chris