[mythtv-users] Is XFS the best choice?

[Daniel Kristjansson]

On Sun, 2007-02-11 at 14:09 +0000, Damian Surr wrote:
> the format of the 3rd partition. The one that had been XFS.
> I went through the install process, leaving the XFS partition alone, 
> then when I was up and running with Ubuntu again, tried to see if I 
> could fix the XFS drive. I didn't get anywhere with it.

I've been using XFS on Linux for about 5 years now. The only
real shocker I had was when I first started using it on
Linux and had a crash. It zeroed out the files that were
opened at the time. But this is just how it works. I don't
use it for the root partition; I only use it for MythTV and
my development disk. I haven't had the problem you are
having which sounds like a botched master boot record. This
can happen with any file system but is exceedingly rare.

This being said there are two gotchas with XFS. You should
not use 4k stacks in the Linux kernel, which is the default.
These 4k stacks are also a problem with other drivers, like
the nVidia closed source drivers. The other gotcha is that
AMD64 compiled kernels and XFS are known to be problematic.
My development machine uses an AMD64 kernel and XFS and I
haven't had any problems, but I wouldn't use that combo
on a production box at the moment.

JFS is pretty much equivalent to XFS performance wise and
might be a good option. I've been using XFS on SGI machines
since 1994, so I'm familiar with it.+

-- Daniel

+ Full disclosure: I have collected paychecks from SGI but I
  never knew anyone involved with XFS and became a fan of the
  file-system when outside the reality distortion field.