5 ms·
Is there any case where one would choose this over ext4 or even zfs?
by hestefisk 3y ago
Is there any case where one would choose this over ext4 or even zfs?
- postmodest 3y agoOn spinning rust, it had guaranteed bandwidth and multiple I/O. On NVME? Not really.
- jeffbee 3y agoOn Linux, XFS never offered guaranteed-rate I/O. It was really an IRIX feature that also required hardware support.
- T3OU-736 3y agoFun story. GRIO (Guaranteed Rate IO) XFS support was added to IRIX due to a request by a US Gov't agency. This agency was doing electronic signal collection with IRIX on SGI HW, and wanted to a way to guarantee that whatever their sensors captured would be written to the storage media, no matter what else is going on at the OS level.
- phsau 3y agoIt's workload dependent; XFS performs better for our database needs.
- SkyMarshal 3y agoCompared to Ext4 or ZFS?
- abwizz 3y agoi'd rekon cow fs performs somewhat poorly with db workload, so, both
- brucethemoose2 3y agozfs and xfs is apples to oranges. One is simple and low overhead, the other is stuffed with features and options. ext4 gives me questionable performance with writing a huge amount (like 50k+) of small files, but other than that its great.
- ericbarrett 3y agoext4 also blocks for a long time when deleting a large file, which can be bad in a production environment (think DROP TABLE in a database).
- angrygoat 3y agothis has a nasty side-effect with NFS, at least <= version 3. ext4 immediately makes the file being unlinked invisible in the filesystem namespace, and then blocks while it does the work of deallocating the space. the NFS client will issue the unlink() call, not hear anything back from the NFS server as it's blocking doing the unlink(), and then eventually time out and retry the operation. at which point the server immediately will return ENOENT as the is no visible file at that path. the annoying thing is that this interaction leaks through into userland programs, and then to users, who see "no such file or directory" errors which cause great confusion. I've seen this multiple times in HPC environments.
- ori_prior 3y agoI've found ext4 to be generally unsuitable to HPC environments due to the 16TB filesize limitation. So it is the wrong tool for the job anyways. xfs all the way!
- compsciphd 3y agoand much worse when fragmented on raid5.
- donmcronald 3y agoMaybe if you’re running MinIO?
- slyall 3y agoext4 is for when you have a simple file system and want something solid. xfs is for when you have a big file system, maybe some some unusual loads but you want stability. zfs is for when you want RAID and snapshots but are prepared to have it blow up every now and then.
- SkyMarshal 3y ago> but are prepared to have it blow up every now and then. First time I've heard that about ZFS, is that really a thing? It was made by Sun to be the ultimate industrial strength FS.
- ahartmetz 3y agoMight be missing a negation, then it's a comparison to btrfs. Me, I'm waiting for bcachefs - Linux native and carefully designed.
- SubjectToChange 3y agobcachefs will have its share of teething issues. Being merged into mainline is only the first step of a very long journey.
- ugjka 3y agoif there is still just one guy working on it, i think it is dead on arrival. I've been hearing about this bcachefs for ages
- slyall 3y agoActually just realized all the examples I was thinking of were BTRFS. Apologies to the ZFS people
- ktm5j 3y agoNo offense taken, I've certainly had a few zfs headaches. But thankfully never anything that couldn't be worked out.
- keeperofdakeys 3y agoCompared to Ext4, I've always found XFS more consistent performance wise. Plus it doesn't require a monthly FSCK which strikes you when you least want it. (Though Ext4 made this way faster than Ext3). XFS also gives you reflink - which is a game changer for some OPs tasks and backups.
- esaym 3y agoIt does not require a monthly fsck. I've set mine to once every 6 months. Been running like that since 2006 or so on many systems. Just do: tune2fs -i 6m /dev/path/to/device
- vbezhenar 3y agoIf you need reflink or quotas.
- shmerl 3y agoI'd ask the opposite, in what case would you choose ext4 over xfs? zfs is an another league, so not comparable. If you need a robust, straightforward and fast filesystem - use xfs. If you need more advanced features - use btrfs or zfs. bcachefs should be an option for that at some point and unlike others it also aims to compete with xfs in speed.
- cesarb 3y ago> I'd ask the opposite, in what case would you choose ext4 over xfs? When you want both Y2038 support and compatibility with slightly older kernels. AFAIK, the Y2038 support was added to XFS only very recently, while ext4 had it for much longer.
- shmerl 3y agoI'd say by 2038 you won't need to worry about older kernels that don't have this support, so it's a non issue.
- ori_prior 3y agoxfs has had large file and large filesystem support for ages, so it is well-tested in that regard. ext4 can do larger filesystems now, but is still limited to 16TB files. zfs ist comparable to xfs in that regard. xfs integrates well into linux and has had excellent performance. zfs is rather odd as a filesystem and circumvents several common linux mechanisms, making it rather awkward. You need to special case everything for zfs in monitoring (sizes are hierarchical overlapping instead of exclusive), ACL support and admin tooling (volume management and partitioning is completely different for zfs, trim is weird, booting is weird). zfs performance is also lacking due to it being very odd and special-casey in the linux kernel, as well as RAM-hungry.