fsck / xfs

Posted Mar 20, 2007 13:24 UTC (Tue) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054)
In reply to: fsck by drag
Parent article: The 2007 Linux Storage and File Systems Workshop

When SGI first introduced XFS for Irix, they talked about "no need for fsck, ever", just as
the ZFS proponent above does. Later they were forced to admit that there are times
when filesystems need to be checked or repaired, and they introduced tools for doing so.

Unfortunately, those tools probably aren't as useful when things go wrong as they would
be if the need for them had been anticipated from the start. Like you, I've discovered the
hard way that XFS is very bad for situations when the disk might accidentally lose power
or get disconnected unexpectedly. SGI apparently designed it for a stable server-room
situation.

I've never had a problem with ext3, and am slowly migrating my XFS filesystems to ext3.

to post comments

fsck / xfs

Posted Mar 22, 2007 11:47 UTC (Thu) by wookey (guest, #5501) [Link] (1 responses)

I too have found the hard way that yanking the power on XFS (or just hitting reset at a bad time) is a very bad idea. All the files that had pending writes just end up as the correct length of zeros. When this is includes your package database, perl binaries and a load of other libs, this is quite bad.

The xfs_repair tool did do a pretty-good repair job (once I fixed it so it ran! http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=414079) but it did take about 5 hours to do it on a pair of 200GB mirrored drives. Then I got to re-install everything to fix the damage.

About 3 days faff in total. Fair dues though - there was no user-data loss and the system was recoverable, but I've never had this trouble with reiser3 on my laptop or ext3 on other boxes. So, yes, XFS is a really nice filesystem (live resizing, nice and fast) but I'd avoid it unless there is a UPS around.

fsck / xfs - versus ZFS

Posted Apr 17, 2007 14:06 UTC (Tue) by qu1j0t3 (guest, #25786) [Link]

It would be wrong to assume ZFS has the same failure modes as XFS. See, for instance: Bill Moore's blog.