4 ms·
I'd be afraid to use XFS for boot FS in particular. I've read that while it is very solid, if it does fail, it fails _hard_ and becomes irrecoverable.
by m0zg 8y ago
I'd be afraid to use XFS for boot FS in particular. I've read that while it is very solid, if it does fail, it fails _hard_ and becomes irrecoverable.
- eropple 8y agoUnrecoverable is a bit much, but it's a pain. There are of course environments where XFS is fine but it's failure cases are pretty bad. I accidentally (wasn't paying attention) used XFS at home once on a NUC that was my UniFi controller and Pi-Hole; any time it lost power it'd hose the partition and make it unmountable. I'd have to go find a monitor and a keyboard and boot it single-user to recover. My fault (we were selling the house and buyers love throwing breakers) but still not awesome. I run boot drives as ext4 exclusively now and I definitely pay more attention during setup.
- jonstewart 8y agoWe’ve been conditioned to think that booting is important, but... isn’t it typically the case that a boot volume is the least interesting data on a system? Of course if you have exotic hardware and a carefully built kernel with all manner of boot params you may feel differently, but then you’d probably have a handy backup somewhere, too.
- eropple 8y ago"Interesting" and "operationally critical" can mean different things. An admittedly extreme example: if you're in a data center with ineffective/insufficient remote hands, you probably very much want the server to come up so you can deal with your problems faster and better. That they could come through, on some timetable, and slap a new OS on there/restore a boot volume from the backup you hope you have is nice, but it isn't the same thing as being able to SSH in and rescue yourself.