XFS for Every Day Computing

Post date: Oct 08, 2013 1:48:58 PM

From what I have observed so far, XFS seems to be a non-mainstream file system.

My history with XFS goes back a long way to the time when I used SGI Indigo2 R10000 Maximum Impact/Solid Impact and O2 workstations when I was a student in National University of Singapore Engineering faculty.  Due to either IRIX bugs or faulty power supplies, the workstations often crashed,  However, the systems always came up instantly and nobody ever did any fsck on the systems, unlike the other UNIX systems where journaled file system was not yet the norm.

When I built my very first computer, an AMD Opteron 175 on an ASUS A8NSLI X16 that booted up properly for the very first time at midnight on 1 January 2006, the file system was XFS.  Every server, workstation, PC, notebook I have set up since have been on XFS, except for a brief period when I tried out ext3 on openSUSE 10.3 (if I remember correctly) just so that I could experience it for myself.  I hated it as the Ext3 file system would do a long fsck every 2 months or so when I booted.  The other exception was when I set up /boot to be ext3 for an all MD RAID 0 SLED 11 set-up.

When you use something long enough, there will be a need to learn things like repair, for rescuing a RAID that has gone bad.