Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 74170
XFS filesystem missing in RH kernel
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:46:46 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020827 Description of problem: XFS filesystem support is still missing in the newest RedHat Linux kernel, preventing everyone from upgrading a RedHat Linux installation with self compiled, XFS enhanced kernel. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Try to upgrade a RedHat 7.3 box where several filesystems have been migrated to XFS via self compiled kernel 2. 3. Actual Results: It doesn't work. Expected Results: Would be very nice if the kernel supports XFS filesystems. Additional info: While this is certainly not a bug, consider the following: Now that XFS made its way into the 2.5 linus kernel tree, it's only a question of time that RedHat will include support for XFS in RedHat Linux. Therefore I'm kindly asking RedHat to include experimental XFS support into their next release in form of an XFS enhanced kernel. This will make life much easier for thousands of RedHat Linux customers and users who already use their own, self compiled, XFS enhanced kernels on RedHat Linux. Thanks!
I think you are misinformed; the XFS filesystem is not yet in any Linus released 2.5 kernel
Fortunately, Linus has merged XFS into his BitKeeper tree; it will thus show up in 2.5.36 :) http://lwn.net/Articles/9998/
Here we're also waiting for RedHat to include XFS support in their distributions. As for now, we cannot upgrade... Does RedHat think that XFS competes with ext3? Kind regards
Note that we really want to move to RedHat 8.0 but will need to spend a lot of effort in doing so as all of our major systems are running XFS as the filesystem. I wonder why RedHat does not support XFS. Most other distributions already do support it. RedHat included ext3 before it was part of the kernel source tree, so this is not a request that goes against policy (unless that was against policy). XFS has proven itself to us due to its ability to handle large numbers of files in a filesystem and the performance of that filesystem. The imap server runs significantly better with XFS than ext3 or ext2 (or BSD UFS - one of the reasons we are moving to Linux is XFS). In fact, in addition to the performance being as good as it is, XFS did not suffer from i-node limitations that we get in all of the other filesystems we tried. Plus the ability to recover from a unexpected crash/reboot has proven to be very robust in our test labs.
XFS used to be a support nightmare (until VERY VERY recently when Linus merged it into 2.5) EXT3 did not form such a nightmare since the on-disk format is compatible with ext2, eg it didn't introduce on-disk layout incompatibilities with Linus' kernel.