XFS is a GPL’d high-performance journaling file system developed by SGI since 1994 for the IRIX operating system. Version 1.0 was released for Linux on May 2001, with the current release being version 1.1. Christoph Hellwig has provided patches aimed towards getting XFS included into the 2.5 development kernel. Read more on KernelTrap.
Kerneltrap: XFS in Linux Kernel 2.5?
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I sure hope they do this or at least it makes it into red hat 8.0 then I would very happy
I doubt that it will be in red hat 8.0. The XFS patches currently changes the kernel significantly, (much more than reiserfs patches used to). But, SGI will probably make an XFS enabled install disk for redhat 8, like it did for rh 7.3 (I think).
hmm well I suppose that will have to do : thanks for the info
Ext3 is RedHat’s “One True Filesystem.” XFS will probably never make it in until 2.6 includes it. And SGI probably won’t make an install disk this time.
Quoted from http://linux.lexilog.org.uk/fs.html
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>&g t;>>>>>>>>
Unfortunately, Red Hat seems to have set its face against supplying XFS as part of its distribution, even though the SGI team has always used Red Hat as their reference system. So even with Red Hat 7.3, installation of an XFS-enabled system from scratch means that a special installation startup disk has to be fetched from the sgi site. The maintainer of this installation disk at SGI is clearly disgruntled over Red Hat’s disdain for XFS, and the readme of his current, and presumably last, version makes the situation plain enough:
Most other major Linux distributions now have built-in XFS support either
available, or in the pipeline. If you require XFS support in your
Linux distribution, please either politely ask that Red Hat include it in
their next release, or consider using a distribution which does support it.
See http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/faq.html#nativesupport for a list
of these distributions
The message is clear. In whatever comes after Red Hat 7.3, you will probably have the choice either of moving to another distribution or doing without an easily-installed XFS. I think XFS is now good enough to make it worth changing distribution loyalties for. For anyone wanting to know more about journaling filesystems on Linux, there is an excellent set of articles on the IBM developerWorks site. Bizarrely, the later articles in this series, including the one specifically on XFS, are not listed on the series contents page, so unless you know they’re there, you won’t find them.
i am using xfs since it is available for linux. and i use it on all my servers and on my ibm thinkpad a22p and had never ever any problem with it.
if sgi does not make anymore the installation disks for red hat, i will still continue to use red hat on my servers, but it will be a big pain to get it installed with xfs.
anyway… xfs is from my point of view, the best jurnaling filesystem under linux. it has so manny tools for working with xfs and eaven under extremly high load (runing lotus domino [with manny, manny users], samba [with manny, manny users], ibm websphere, db2 server, ftpd, etc under the same physical server) it never ever dissapointed me.
i don’t understand those kernel people! if something is good and works well, then why they don’t include it?
reiserfs did it into the kernel and every time i look at the changelog i see fixes/changes/whatever for it. reiserfs seams to be a cameleon….. changing everytime in every dam kernel build and in every pre build.
how ever… nothing will stop me from using xfs. eaven if the kernel guys don’t include it into the mainstream kernel. something good like xfs is worth patching my kernel!
cheers
SteveB
It looks like I’ll need to try out mandrake again I tryed 8.0 and didn’t like it. Does everyone think that’s the best XFS diso to try?
i don’t like mandrake, but it is one of the systems wich makes a installation of a linux system with xfs a very easy task.
well I’m not really that great at linux is slackware that hard? or do you think it would be easier to patch rat hat compared to doing slackware?
I’ve been trying out a few journaling filesystems for a large archive of music that I have (all legal, I have 6 full caselogic CD cases in my closet) in addition to the root filesystem. I’m hoping I can decide on “the right one” for the long-term.
First I tried ext3… I was messing around with some binary-only modules, and a couple crashes later, the filesystem was unmountable.
Now I’m using XFS. Its made its through several crashes scratch-free. However, when listing large directories, XFS will sometimes pause for several seconds the first time you do it. Sometimes it even takes a few seconds to get a bash prompt after opening up an xterm. This is little more than an annoyance, but its one I didn’t have when using ext2 on similar filesystems.
So, I’m going to be trying ReiserFS next. It is supposed to be high-performance… I just hope they worked all the kinks out over the past few years. A few years ago it couldn’t be exported via NFS, wouldn’t work correctly with KDE, and who knows what else. Well, wish me luck!
Jim
well I was just on the #xfs channel and they seem to think mandrake is good to use if you want xfs (I would try gentoo but the build time would be looong)
Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that.. Alot of people using Red Hat likes XFS. One of those people is probably smart enough to do some modifications to the install disk, so you can easily install XFS with it.
I installed anaconda (is on disc 2), and check out /usr/lib/anaconda/fsset.py. It would seem that anaconda has support for xfs.
Set xfsFileSystem.supported = 1, and it should show up during install.
Recompile the kernel with xfs support, include the xfs tools, and put them in that isolinux image thingie.
Make an rpm out of your compiled kernel, and replace the rh kernel rpm with it.
That should pretty much all there is to it. I think. (?)
There is quite a good reason why XFS isn’t in the kernel yet. It makes some very invasive changes to the kernel. For example, instead of using generic page buffer routines, it defines its own. Linus didn’t put it in the kernel because it touches parts of the kernel that have nothing to do with XFS. ReiserFS on the other hand, doesn’t touch all parts of the kernel. It can be in flux as much as it wants, and that won’t affect other parts of the system. Now, in 2.5, XFS has been changed so that the changes required to the rest of the kernel are entirely minimal (a few lines). Thus, it will probably go in in 2.5. (Read the linked thread, its quite informative).