I am not attempting to start a holy war here, but in the x86 install guide, it mentions that XFS is recommended. From my personal experiences, I would not recommend XFS for the faint of heart - I have found it to be extremely unstable. (I have had repeated problems with it refusing to mount until xfs_repaired, or at least mounted by a non-Gentoo system [?], as in tonight's case when I spent an hour recovering my filesystem after a USB driver I was writing hung the machine. It also seems not to respond to emergency sync and umount from SysRq, which causes metadata inconsistencies.) I would suggest at the very least putting a warning in the installation guide, or at best suggesting a different filesystem such as ReiserFS. (I may be wrong, but I speak from personal experience when I've had a ReiserFS box's plug get repeatedly kicked out, or worse yet, flaky hardware causing random reboots.) Sorry if I've gone over something that's been discussed before. --joshua
on the same note i can recall times when a box (running xfs and reiserfs) went down and the reiserfs was severly messed up but xfs was fine i think this is more along the lines of people saying 'maxtor flakes out more than western digital' and vice versa ... everyone has experiences to support one or the other ... in other words, if we add a warning that xfs is unreliable, we'll have people requesting we remove that warning and add it to reiserfs
Agreed. I have noticed that XFS support has been hard to come by in other kernels (non-Gentoo), but your point remains valid. I think that it is also still a valid point that there should be SOME sort of warning in terms of filesystems, or at least no recommendation at all. This whole thing does seem to come down to a matter of personal preference, though.
where do you see 'xfs is recommended' ? in the install guide it highly recommends ext2/ext3 ... in fact it even mentions xfs failing under some conditions ... from the install guide: 6.Partition Configuration Now that the kernel can see the network card and disk controllers, it's time to set up disk partitions for Gentoo Linux. Here's a quick overview of the standard Gentoo Linux partition layout. We're going to create at least three partitions: a swap partition, a root partition (to hold the bulk of Gentoo Linux), and a special boot partition. The boot partition is designed to hold the GRUB or LILO boot loader information as well as your Linux kernel(s). The boot partition gives us a safe place to store everything related to booting Linux. During normal day-to-day Gentoo Linux use, your boot partition should remain unmounted. This prevents your kernel from being made unavailable to GRUB (due to filesystem corruption) in the event of a system crash, preventing the chicken-and-egg problem where GRUB can't read your kernel (since your filesystem isn't consistent) but you can't bring your filesystem back to a consistent state (since you can't boot!) Now, on to filesystem types. Right now, you have four filesystem options: XFS, ext2, ext3 (journaling) and ReiserFS. ext2 is the tried and true Linux filesystem but doesn't have metadata journaling. ext3 is the new version of ext2 with both metadata journaling and ordered data writes, effectively providing data journaling as well. ReiserFS is a B*-tree based filesystem that has very good small file performance, and greatly outperforms both ext2 and ext3 when dealing with small files (files less than 4k), often by a factor of 10x-15x. ReiserFS also scales extremely well and has metadata journaling. As of kernel 2.4.18+, ReiserFS is finally rock-solid and highly recommended. XFS is a filesystem with metadata journaling that is fully supported under Gentoo Linux's xfs-sources kernel, but is generally not recommended due to its tendency to lose recently-modified data if your system locks up or unexpectedly reboots (due to a power failure, for instance.) If you're looking for the most standard filesystem, use ext2. If you're looking for the most rugged journalled filesystem, use ext3. If you're looking for a high-performance filesystem with journaling support, use ReiserFS; both ext3 and ReiserFS are mature and refined. Here are our basic recommended filesystem sizes and types:
*mumbles* Must've changed it. *closes bug*
