Re: Help creating filesystem (xfs) and partitioning

[Stan Hoeppner <stan@hardwarefreak.com>]

On 7/23/2013 7:06 PM, Roberto Spadim wrote:

> /boot with 200mb, xfs filesystem and raid1

Using a journaling filesystem for /boot is pointless.  Use EXT2 instead.

> swap with 20gb (or 10gb),
> / with 100gb, xfs filesystem and raid1
> /home with all disk left (near to 400gb), xfs filesystem and raid1

It is ill advised to put more than one XFS filesystem on a single
(effective) spindle which is what RAID1 is.  Doing so results in too
many allocation groups, which results in head thrashing, which results
in decreased performance.  Use a single XFS for rootfs and home, manage
space by enabling and setting quotas.

...
> Now the point is, what's the best fdisk, mdadm, mkfs_xfs, tunefs,
> smartctl and others tune tools and /sys /proc parameters?
> I want a good align and performace

None of these will increase your performance with a RAID1 pair.
Switching your elevator from CFQ to deadline, and making sure NCQ is
enabled and working properly, is about the best you can do to maximize
md RAID1 performance.  And using a single XFS as I described above,
instead of 2 or 3.

If your workload(s) involve heavy mixed metadata and data changes, i.e.
untar a kernel tarball then delete the directory tree, then mounting
with inode64 will improve performance a bit.  inode64 has been made the
default XFS allocator but I'm not sure with which kernel version that
took affect.  To find out simply do "cat /proc/mounts".

See mkfs.xfs(8), mount(8)
http://xfs.org/index.php/XFS_FAQ
http://xfs.org/docs/xfsdocs-xml-dev/XFS_Labs/tmp/en-US/html/xfs-quotas-lab.html

-- 
Stan