XFS is a good filesystem. But it's not perfect. At work, we lost an entire openstack cluster just before Christmas, due to loss of the XFS storage. Likely a transient disk or memory hardware error, but it proved to be completely unrecoverable, even with the XFS tools.
RedHat seem to be falling back to XFS + LVM in the absence of Btrfs being anywhere remotely near production readiness. But XFS doesn't go much beyond metadata journalling; it's still very much a filesystem of the 90s, albeit a good one. It doesn't do data journalling, and it doesn't do block level hashing/checksumming, and it can't self heal or scrub itself. There is zero protection from data errors.
This is an area where there's a good bit of cognitive dissonance going on at the moment. The harsh truth of the matter is that Linux doesn't have a top notch native filesystem *at all* right now. You can use ZFS if you are able to use third-party modules. And at work we use expensive IBM GPFS stuff. But while Linux has a huge number of filesytems provided natively, they are all, for one reason or another, crap in different ways.
I've been trying out NILFS2 on a new system. So far it isn't crap, and its auto-snapshot capability has already saved me from an rm -r I later wanted to undo.
Not that I would describe ext4 and XFS as crap, either, though.
(Score: 3, Informative) by rleigh on Thursday February 09 2017, @11:12PM
XFS is a good filesystem. But it's not perfect. At work, we lost an entire openstack cluster just before Christmas, due to loss of the XFS storage. Likely a transient disk or memory hardware error, but it proved to be completely unrecoverable, even with the XFS tools.
RedHat seem to be falling back to XFS + LVM in the absence of Btrfs being anywhere remotely near production readiness. But XFS doesn't go much beyond metadata journalling; it's still very much a filesystem of the 90s, albeit a good one. It doesn't do data journalling, and it doesn't do block level hashing/checksumming, and it can't self heal or scrub itself. There is zero protection from data errors.
This is an area where there's a good bit of cognitive dissonance going on at the moment. The harsh truth of the matter is that Linux doesn't have a top notch native filesystem *at all* right now. You can use ZFS if you are able to use third-party modules. And at work we use expensive IBM GPFS stuff. But while Linux has a huge number of filesytems provided natively, they are all, for one reason or another, crap in different ways.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Wednesday February 15 2017, @03:32AM
I've been trying out NILFS2 on a new system. So far it isn't crap, and its auto-snapshot capability has already saved me from an rm -r I later wanted to undo.
Not that I would describe ext4 and XFS as crap, either, though.