[OpenAFS] Which file system is the best for AFS data partitions?

[Robert Banz]

On Jul 13, 2007, at 16:58, Russ Allbery wrote:

> Frank Burkhardt <fbo2@gmx.net> writes:
>
>> I'll take the chance to ask everyone about their filesystem  
>> preferences
>> for (namei-) AFS data partitions. I'm especially interested in things
>> like "I used XYfs but moved to YZfs because of XX". Please write  
>> about
>> non-linux servers filesystem preferences, too.
>
> We use ext3 because it's mainline, supported, and I simply don't  
> trust the
> other file systems to have had sufficient real-world testing and
> sufficient attention paid to recovery tools.
>
> I care more about file system consistency and reasonable recovery from
> hardware and software failure than I do about the last iota of speed.

We used to use XFS on linux as well -- though with the performance  
differences you have noticed, I'd be interested to see the benchmarks  
on XFS with/without an fsync'ing volserver & fileserver.  Those can  
be pretty fsync() intensive operations, and that could be where XFS  
is falling down.  We had a couple fileservers that we were running  
ext3 on for awhile as well, never had any problems with them to  
complain about.

Right now we're a Solaris/ZFS shop, which isn't without its  
problems.  However, its been amazingly stable/resilient/easy to  
manage -- which is where I think Linux + whateverfilesystemyoumention  
falls down.  Sometimes that can be just as important as raw performance.

-rob