[mythtv-users] ZFS - what's the scoop?

[Brian Guilfoos]

Craig Courtney wrote:
> On 10/18/07, *Brian Guilfoos* <mythtv at guilfoos.com
> <mailto:mythtv at guilfoos.com>> wrote:
> 
>     NB, some of us have had problems with XFS, RAID(?), and CentOS.  I had
>     relatively frequent kernel panics on my system that appeared to be in
>     the XFS module, which were only fixed by ditching XFS and using ext3 and
>     slow deletes.  My file server uses CentOS4, RAID5, and LVM.
> 
> 
> I'm currently running 4 250g hard drives in RAID 5 under CentOS 5 with
> XFS for my recordings and I'm not having any problems.  This is with
> stock kernel and xfs kmod.  I have a separate hard drive on a different
> controller with the OS, swap and database running on it.  As always
> everyone runs different hardware and may have different experiences.

Thanks for the datapoint, Craig.  I'm reasonably sure that LVM
contributed to the problem for me.  It's possible the problem was fixed
in CentOS5, but I know I wasn't the only one.  At any rate, I'm
reasonably happy with ext3 and slow deletes (and I don't have enough
storage space to move all 963GB on that array somewhere else to reformat
with XFS again anyway). :)

For Peter: it doesn't hurt to try XFS.  I was able to move to ext3 after
my problems without losing any data because I hadn't filled the array
beyond the capacity of a single drive on another computer on my LAN yet.
 When I wasn't having kernel panics, XFS was all kinds of peachy
performance-wise.