Re:Files Are Hard
by nickpsecurity on Sunday December 13, 2015 @06:06PM
(#10728369)
It was designed by SGI for high-end workstations and supercomputers with long-running jobs (esp render farms). So, that doesn't surprise me. However, it's nice to have all the assumptions in the open and preferrably in user/admin guides. Another issue was it zeroing out stuff on occasion but they fixed that.
2004 is not current for XFS, that is a decade ago! However, disks finishing writes and not lying about having done it is a critical need for all FS. For some like ext3 you would notice it less as it was flush happy.
XFS is becoming the sane default filesystem for servers as it allocates nodes more consistently than the other current mainstream linux options on multidisk systems. Basically small servers now have more disk space and performance than the large systems of 2004. So XFS stayed put in where it starts to make sense, but systems grew to meet its sweetspot much often.
Re:Files Are Hard
by nickpsecurity on Monday December 14, 2015 @01:29PM
(#10732797)
Pretty good analysis.
It's written in 2004 so I don't know how current it is, but it makes the point that XFS makes certain performance & safety guarantees essentially assuming that you're running on hardware that has a UPS with the ability to interrupt the OS saying "oops, we're out of power".