How to get XFS to be properly supported in FC

[George N. White III]

On Fri, 30 Sep 2005, Peter Gordon wrote:

>> I hope that you are well. I just wanted to find out how I could go
>> about soliciting support for getting XFS into the Anaconda installer
>> GUI and text FS selector drop down menu without having to type
>> linux xfs at the prompt.
>
> For the moment, XFS is not officially supported by the Fedora Project
> (i.e., you're probably on your own if something breaks).[1]

Depending on your hardware, there are XFS tools that don't work with the 
4k stacks in FC4 kernels.  If your CPU has an adequate supply of registers 
(e.g., not i686), you use SCSI disk, and have usage patterns that "fit" 
XFS then your chances that nothing will break are much improved.  People 
(myself included) with less ideal configurations have encountered 
problems, only to find that the diagnostic, maintenance, and repair tools 
wouldn't run.

I work in field (remote sensing) where XFS on SGI MIPS platforms has been 
an important tool.  Now many developers have abandoned IRIX in favor of 
linux, and these apps (using P4 commodity hardware with ample RAM) appear 
to offer comparable performance to the IRIX versions running on old R10k 
MIPS platforms.  I'm told that existing XFS filesystems (e.g., external 
SCSI RAID) from IRIX can be mounted on a PC with linux.

In my view, the uses of linux are too diverse to expect one distro to
fit all requirements.  I think RH needs to do well at web server 
and database transaction workloads on commodity hardware.  SUSE, through 
the connection with SGI, has staked out a niche with the people who
have the hardware and need things that XFS alone provides.

> It's also
> one of the things on the Wishlist for FC5.[2]
>
> [1] http://www.fedorafaq.org/#reiserjfs
> [2] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Wishlist

It will only get easier as the current register constainted machines are 
retired, newer disk technology is more widespread.  Even if you don't
want to use SUSE, you might learn a lot by scanning SUSE lists and
groups for reports of XFS issues.

-- 
George N. White III  <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>