XFS as default FS - does RH have a guide for corrupted FS recovery

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Hi,
i just been searching through the rhel forums and knowledgebase for info on the XFS FS. Didn't find much.

In this regard, i'd like to ask:

  • biggest question - does RH have some papers on how-to recovery of the corrupted XFS FS? Ext4 is very well known, but if i deploy XFS and it gets corrupted .. what would be the steps to remedy the errors? Is it really safe to go XFS for '/' (root) FS? how about FS recovery when server crashes? and '/' is not accessible?

  • why the move from ext4 to xfs - i've been googling it and can't find a clear answer there.. was it because XFS support 500tb and ext4 only 50tb in rhel7.0 ?

  • does the RH have any documentation where to read on the proper deployment of XFS and does RH have performance comparison to EXT vs. XFS ?

I didnt work with XFS previously, so i need to gather as much info as i can, before deploing it. Mainly the recovery is what i'm interested in..

thanks

ka
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Responses

rhn-support-mflitter's picture Red Hat Guru 1638 points
4 August 2014 12:08 PM

Hi Karel,

Section 6.5 of The Storage Administration Guide covers file system repair and Section 6.9.1 shows the XFS equivalents of ext4 commands.

The process for fixing a corrupt root fs is essentially the same as before, except that we use xfs_repair instead of fsck.

On page 18 of his Summit Presentation Ric Wheeler notes:

• XFS is the reigning champion of larger servers and high end
storage devices
    • Tends to extract the most from the hardware
    • Well tuned to multi-socket and multi-core servers

• XFS has a proven track record at scale
    • RHEL 6 certified partners run XFS up to 300TB
    • Maximum RHEL 7 XFS file system size is 500TB

So the decision is at least in part to do with scalability and making the best use of the available hardware (in particular, I understand that to be SSD devices). I will ask for further information if you need it.

Please remember, ext4 is still supported and you are not required to migrate your RHEL 7 servers to XFS. We'd like you to, obviously, as we have made it the default, but it is not an enforced requirement.

Please let me know if you have more questions or need to dig deeper,
Best regards
Mark

Petr Bokoc's picture Red Hat Active Contributor 200 points
4 August 2014 12:09 PM

Hi,

I only have a partial answer for you, but still, this might help. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Installation Guide contains a reference table that you can use - it shows commonly used commands used when working with ext4 (mount, resize2fs, etc.), and their equivalents for XFS. For additional information, see the man pages for various XFS commands.

ka Active Contributor 246 points
5 August 2014 8:14 AM

Thank you for provided links and points.
I'm read as much as i can i decided to wait with xfs untill more ppl use it.
I searched, googled ... and there is lots of stuff on inet, but thing is, i dont know how much it is relevant, because there were quite some things reported / fixed in past 2 years.

I still will wait for the reports on usage of barrier / no barrier mount option with various hardware, i'm concerned about some reported hard locks on xfs when experted via NFS4 ..

Still too hot.

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