[mythtv-users] CentOS vs Fedora, RAID vs LVM

[John Drescher]

On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 2:12 PM, John Drescher <drescherjm at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 2:01 PM, Brian Wood <beww at beww.org> wrote:
>> On Wednesday 01 April 2009 11:52:00 Travis Tabbal wrote:
>>> On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 11:21 AM, John Drescher <drescherjm at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> > I have had the good success with xfs for 2 years of mythtv storage on
>>> > 7 of my storage groups. I was converting all the rest of my reiserfs
>>> > storage groups to xfs but now I will be making them all ext4. ext4 is
>>> > fast at large files like xfs and is not slow at deleting like ext3 or
>>> > reiserfs. ext4 is also fast at small files unlike xfs which tends to
>>> > be slow on operations with thousands of small files.
>>>
>>> Let us know how that goes. I'm still waiting for a bit on ext4 like I do
>>> with every new FS. They always seem to have a little bug here or there that
>>> causes data loss. I don't store any large amounts of small files on my XFS
>>> drives, just recordings. So I can afford to wait for now.
>>
>> I used to wait 'till something was actually incorporated into the kernel,
>> because I took that as an indication it was "mature" enough for me to use.
>>
>> That philosophy seems to have changed though, making early adopters of new
>> kernels essentially alpha or beta testers, making the kernel a marketing tool
>> for new developments.
>>
>> I'd like to see us go back to the "odd/even" model of kernel development, but
>> that's not going to happen, since Linus considers reliability testing to
>> be "boring".
>>
>
> I have been using ext4 on my new main development box at home (also
> the master backend) since I installed it in late November. I am
> running a 2.6.26 openvz kernel. I have probably 500GB on ext4 in 5 or
> so partitions. One of these is a 200 to 300GB mythtv storage group
> that has become pretty much the default since it was empty while the
> others are full. In this time I have had only 1 problem with ext4. I
> had a filesystem lockup when trying to grow the filesystem while
> running a virtualbox on the same system. The good thing is that even
> though I ended up having to reboot no data was lost and I was able to
> do the resize2fs after the reboot. I think I had to use the magic
> sysrq keys to force a reboot for that though.
>

BTW, I was not clear about one thing. The OS filesystem is not ext4.
Its actually xfs, bad choice for the OS I know. Actually I have 7 hard
drives in this system and usually only 2 of them are powered up
(removable hot swap bay with switches and hdparm powerdown) so ext4 is
not the only or even main filesystem in use.

John