XFS Brings Bug Fixes & Minor Improvements To Linux 4.7

[phoronix]

Phoronix: XFS Brings Bug Fixes & Minor Improvements To Linux 4.7

Dave Chinner has submitted the XFS file-system updates for the Linux 4.7 kernel merge window...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XFS-Linux-4.7

[Guest]

Just to drum up a little discussion; is there any point to using ext4 over XFS nowadays? I've been replacing ext4 with XFS for most things for a while now. I'm under the assumption XFS is better in some way, but really don't know

[starshipeleven]

Afaik the lore was:
-XFS was supposed to be better under heavy (server-grade) load, or in crappy devices (it's common in home NAS devices), since it comes from the server space.

-ext4 is supposed to be better for more daily hardware as it is more resistant to power loss, it does have mature fsck and tooling, and so on.

There were some horror stories in the (distant) past about systems with XFS that after a power loss while doing things suffered significant data loss, but I think it should have been fixed by now.

If you look at benches, https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...x-4.4-FS-4-Way

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-4.4-FS-4-Way

They mostly trade blows. I'd say that it comes down to features or ext4's more "robustness" if it still has that edge on XFS.

I'm personally on ext4 and will eventually move to btrfs when they implement the raid5-6.

[MartinK]

Just to drum up a little discussion; is there any point to using ext4 over XFS nowadays? I've been replacing ext4 with XFS for most things for a while now. I'm under the assumption XFS is better in some way, but really don't know

I think the only real reason could be that you can't shrink a XFS filesystem (you can grow in while mounted though) but you can shrink and grow EXT4. On the other hand file system shrinking is not a frequent use case anyway and if you place a thin LV under XFS then it becomes a non-issue.

Overall I really like modern XFS - it feels performant and robust as a tank, so I use it for all new systems I set up these days.