On 10/12/2018 07:35 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
[snip]
> On SL 7? Why? Is there any reason not to use xfs? I've appreciated the
> ext filesystems, I've known its original author for decades. (He was
> my little brother in my fraternity!) But there's not a compelling
> reason to use it in recent SL releases.


Sure there is. Anyone who has to mange fluctuating disks in an LVM knows
precisely why you avoid XFS - Shrink an XFS formated LVM partition. Oh,
wait. You can't. ;-)

My server with EXT4 will be back on line with adjusted filesystem sizes
before the XFS partition has even finished backing up! It is a trivial,
well-documented, and quick process to adjust an ext4 file-system.

Granted, I'm in a world where people can't seem to judge how they are
going to use the space on their server and frequently have to come to me
needing help because they did something silly like allocate 50G to /opt
and 1G to /var. *rolls eyes* (sadly that was a true event.) Adjusting
filesystems for others happens far too frequently for me. At least it is
easy for the EXT4 crowd.

Also, I can't think of a single compelling reason to use XFS over EXT4.
Supposedly XFS is great for large files of 30+ Gb, but I can promise you
that most of the servers and desktops I support have easily 95% of their
files under 100M (and I would guess ~70% are under 1M). I know this,
because I help the backup team on occasion. I've seen the histograms of
file size distributions.

For all the arguments of performance, well I wouldn't use either XFS or
EXT4. I use ZFS and Ceph on the systems I want performance out of.

Lastly, (I know - single data point) I almost never get the "help my
file system is corrupted" from the EXT4 crowd but I've long stopped
counting how many times I've heard XFS eating files. And the few times
it is EXT4 I don't worry because the tools for recovery are long and
well tested. The best that can be said for XFS recovery tools is "Well,
they are better now then they were."

To me, it still boggles my mind why it is the default FS in the EL world.

But that's me. :-)

~Stack~