[OpenAFS] Overview? Linux filesystem choices

[chas williams - CONTRACTOR]

On Wed, 29 Sep 2010 12:35:23 -0400
Steve Simmons <scs@umich.edu> wrote:

> Yep, we're pretty much a 100% ext3 shop. We keep a close eye on other
> things, and zfs has been looking more and more interesting. But given
> the uncertain state of its future (see elsewhere in this thread) our
> caution level has gone up quite a bit. For the really long term I
> also keep an eye on btrfs, but some of it's features aren't as big a
> win for AFS as they are for 'regular' users. Ext4 looks interesting
> just for the fsck speed improvements (just freaking amazing). Extents
> may also be useful, but I strongly suspect other issues bottleneck
> AFS performance before the filesystem speed does. Then again, better
> speed never hurts.

we use solaris ufs on our current fileservers, but xfs practically
everywhere else.  this is mostly due to our irix heritage but xfs has
some benefits that ext3 does not have (like extents).  xfs is certainly
quite a bit more mature than ext3 in my opinion.  ext4 is an attempt to
get some of these xfs features into ext3.

as far as bugs with xfs -- not too many.  we have done some really bad
things to the xfs filesystems as well (like power failures several
times in one week).

yes, i think extents probably arent a huge win for afs fileservers as
they currently exist.

it isnt clear to me that zfs is a big win for afs either.  you need
more storage?  add another vicep.  dont expand your existing volumes.
yes, you might need to do a little more volume management but errors in
a single filesystem wont potentially get all your data.