Questions about XFS

clflush
2007-03-13T15:13:32Z

Hi,

I have a few simple questions regarding the XFS file system. I built a new
small server here (commodity hardware, x86-64) and I've installed 32-bit
openSUSE 10.2 on it. After the system was installed, configured and up and
running, it hung while I was browsing with Firefox. The only thing I could do
was to press the reset button on the computer. After the reboot, when I
opened Firefox again, I noticed that all my bookmarks were gone. Those
bookmarks were imported from my desktop machine a few days after I configured
the new server.

All file systems on this new server are XFS because I heard good things about
it and it generally performs better in database operations compared to other
file systems available for Linux. However, I was pretty surprised that when I
had to reset the machine because it hung for some reason, all the bookmarks
in Firefox were gone, so now I have my doubts about the reliability and data
integrity of XFS. My older server, which also runs openSUSE 10.2 (32-bit) but
uses Ext3 as file system never had such issues and I had to reset it many
times because it was hanging for some reason.

Am I right to assume that XFS compared to Ext3 does not do a very good job
regarding data integrity? I know a little bit about file systems and I know
that most file systems depend on the application to do the right job
regarding the way it opens/locks/saves files, but in reality not all
applications are written in a safe way to guarantee this.

Basically, my two question that I have are:

- Why did I lost bookmarks on a machine running XFS while on another one which
runs the same OS version but uses Ext3 as file system, it never happened, no
matter how many times I had to reset it.

- Are there any efforts currently made to increase the data integrity of XFS?

Regards