On 10/12/18 8:09 PM, ~Stack~ wrote:
> 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~
>

The one thing I'd offer you in terms of EXT4 vs XFS.... Do NOT have a system crash on very large filesystems (> than 1TB) with EXT4.

It will take days to fsck completely.  Trust me on this.  I did it (5.5TB RAID6)... and then converted to XFS.  Been running well for 3 years now.