Re: Best filesystems ?

Steve Costaras
2010-10-24T00:16:39Z

On 2010-10-23 13:13, Peter Grandi wrote:
>
> * JFS is good for almost everything, including largish filesystems
> on somewhat largish systems with lots of processes accessing
> lots of files, and works equally well on 32b and 64b, is very
> stable, and has a couple of nice features. Its major downside is
> less care than XFS for barriers. I think that it can support
> well filesystems up to 10-15TB, and perhaps beyond. It should
> have been made the default for Linux for at least a decade
> instead of 'ext3'.

Would comment here that JFS is indeed very good, but does have a problem
when reaching/hitting the 32TB boundary. This appears to be a user
space tool issue. It is the main reason why I switched over to XFS as
was running into this problem too often.

> * XFS is like JFS, and with somewhat higher scalability both as to
> sizes and as to higher internal parallelism in the of multiple
> processes accessing the same file, and has a couple of nice
> features (mostly barrier support, but also small blocks and large
> inodes). Its major limitation are internal complexity and should
> only be used on 64b systems. It can support single filesystems
> larger than 10-15TB, but that's stretching things.

Have used XFS up to 120TB myself on real media (i.e. not sparse files)
under linux; will be building >128 shortly. Have used more w/ XFS
Irix in the past.

Generally I find with most file systems/tools there are many bugs when
you cross bit boundaries where they were not tested. Whenever
using/planning large systems /always/ test first and have good backups.