After the problem last week with XFS, today seems like a second take.
I wake up this morning with a reply about my HFS+ export patch, telling me that I have to implement the get_parent interface to make sure that NFS works even when the dentry cache is empty (which is what caused some issues with iTunes while I was doing my conversion most likely), good enough, I started working on it.
And while I was actually working on it, I find that the tinderbox is not compiling. A dmesg later shows that, once again, XFS had in-memory corruption, and I have to restart the box again. Thankfully, I got my SysRescue USB stick, which allowed me to check the filesystem before restarting.
Now this brings me to a couple of problems I have to solve. The first is that I finally have to switch /var/tmp to its own partition so that /var does not get clobbered if/when the filesystem go crazy; the second is that I have to consider alternatives to XFS for my filesystems. My home is already using ext3, but I don’t need performance there so it does not matter much; my root partition is using JFS since that’s what I tried when I reinstalled the system last year, although it didn’t turn out very good, and the resize support actually ate my data away.
Since I don’t care if my data gets eaten away on /var/tmp (the worst that might happen is me losing a patch I’m working on, or not being able to fetch the config.log for a failed package – and that is something I’ve been thinking about already), I think I’ll try something more “hardcore” and see how it goes, I think I’ll use ext4 as /var/tmp, unless it panics my kernel, in which case I’m going to try JFS again.
Oh well, time to resume my tasks I guess!
The filesystem situation is f*cked up in Linux. I’ve got great expectations for btrfs but I’m not going to trust it for at least another two or three years.At the moment I’m using XFS but I’m evaluating the opportunity of switching to a large LVM2 volume, comprising most of my three disks, with a few logical volumes on it (with what filesystems?).I’m not too worried about stability or data loss, because contextually I’m going to adopt a serious backup policy, but I’m worried for the eventual performance hit and I can’t find serious benchmarks.
http://www.phoronix.com/sca…Seems like XFS and Ext4 have mostly the same performance.BTW: The comment-parser is broken, it inserts an additional ; after & in urls postet in comments. As of this bug my link won’t work as is 🙁