[mythtv-users] EXT4 vs XFS

[Steven Adeff]

On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 9:55 PM, Daniel Kristjansson
<danielk at cuymedia.net> wrote:
> On Sun, 2011-11-13 at 18:34 -0500, Scott & Nicole Harris wrote:
>> I followed that thread, and it seemed to me that the issue boiled down to
>> not really an "ext4" thing per-say but having the correct mount options for
>> ext4 AND (more importantly?) properly configuring MySQL.
>
> Both ext4 and XFS are more prone to data loss with the nobarrier
> mount option than ext3. So ext3 is a better file system to use for
> the partition containing your database and your /etc and /var/log
> and /home directories. You should still mount that partition with
> nobarrier,noatime for decent performance with recent kernels.
>
> ext4 and XFS should both work acceptably for the recording disks even
> with barriers enabled. But XFS will win out on a number of metrics
> which may matter if you have a lot of recorders or a large number of
> concurrently active frontends. Meanwhile ext3 is not a good filesystem
> for the disk[s] containing your recordings, primarily because it can
> take a really long time to delete old files and is more prone to
> fragmentation.
>
> I am actually surprised at how well XFS has held up over the years.
> It hasn't changed much in at least the last decade and was designed
> almost two decades ago, the company that created it doesn't exist
> anymore, but it's better than both the newer ext4 and BRTFS file
> systems in all real world tests. It probably speaks to the chops of
> the engineers who designed it.
>
> -- Daniel

Hey Daniel (or anyone else who knows), could you explain a little more
about the barrier/nobarrier setting?

I currently have my root with /etc and /var/log on my backend as an
ext4 partition and my recording drives as xfs. I'd like to know if I
should bother to use the nobarrier mount option for my recording
drives and what I should expect by doing so.

Also, should bother to "move" my root to ext3 type?

Thanks!

-- 
Steve
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/User:Steveadeff
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