Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

foetz wrote: another alternative is http://www.ufsexplorer.com/download_pro.php

I think it's the same people with a new name and website .... they were probably spooks in the old USSR, deciphering submarine transmissions

FreeBSD's msdosfs supports FAT32, no worries there. It's a flag when mounting the device. I imagine XFS got dropped from v10 because of the lack of maintainers... http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=mount_msdosfs&sektion=8&apropos=0&manpath=FreeBSD+10.1-RELEASE

UFS2 and FFS are both basically BSD UFS with some extras such as journaling and soft updates as well as larger disk support. The FFS in Bitrig, a fork of OpenBSD actually has GPT & journaling. As for Linux's XFS support it's been around ever since SGI ported it around 2000 and is supported in kernel by most modern distros, and has been for like forever. The problem is it's not always available when installing (RHEL (and thus CentOS) only made it a default in v7). Until ext4fs came around I used XFS as my standard FS and never lost a single piece of data, it's been wonderful!

Given that write support for XFS appeared after ZFS support was well established in FreeBSD, I'm not terribly surprised they never saw significant uptake of XFS...

smj wrote: Given that write support for XFS appeared after ZFS support was well established in FreeBSD, I'm not terribly surprised they never saw significant uptake of XFS...

Different animals. I've got them both here, no way in hell would I use zfs for a desktop. But it's grrrrr-ate for swervers.

Well, more or less. For a small server I'd still probably prefer xfs. Zfs just has too much crap in it for lightweight uses.

indeed zfs is quite fat and, depending on what you wanna use it for, needs some tweaks i.e. the default performance can be rather poor

Since it hasn't been mentioned here yet: NetBSD also has support for xfs. Or had, the release I used back when I tried it a few years ago is very old now, I haven't kept up with NetBSD developments since then.

tingo wrote: Since it hasn't been mentioned here yet: NetBSD also has support for xfs. Or had, the release I used back when I tried it a few years ago is very old now, I haven't kept up with NetBSD developments since then.

I'm pretty sure that NetBSD has never supported xfs (there certainly isn't any support in the source tree I have checked out, which should be HEAD somewhere around 7.99.13). There is support for efs and the sgi volume headers though, perhaps you were thinking of that?

Do keep in mind XFS versions. Linux XFS is built around XFSv2, from the later IRIX 6.5 releases (about .12 and up), but probably will mount IRIX 6.5 XFSv1 releases. IRIX 6.2 XFS is slightly different, as is IRIX 5.3+XFS XFS (this one is pretty much guaranteed not to work). My guess is that 6.3 and 6.4 have a different version of XFS as well.

FWIW, here's what the Linux source (in fs/xfs/libxfs/xfs_format.h) has to say about XFS (superblock) versions:

XFS V4 and above use two additional bitmask fields to specify which features are/aren't supported in a more fine-grained manner. The Linux kernel will only mount some version 4 filesystems with certain feature bits set, and filesystems with version code 5. Specifically, the directory format version 2 flag. So what SAQ called "version 2" is what the Linux kernel source calls either version 4 with the DIRV2 bitflag set, or version 5. There's a bit of info in the XFS FAQ about this, but not much.

Interestingly, the Linux version 5 info doesn't appear in the corresponding header (/usr/include/sys/fs/xfs_clnt.h) on IRIX. I wonder if IRIX supports it or if it's a Linux extension?

(Aside: don't you just love the way the "version 2" on-disk format was introduced with what the kernel calls "version 4"? I guess consistent numbering is over-rated.)

jpstewart wrote: Interestingly, the Linux version 5 info doesn't appear in the corresponding header (/usr/include/sys/fs/xfs_clnt.h) on IRIX. I wonder if IRIX supports it or if it's a Linux extension?

CRC support was added in Linux XFS, kernel 3.10 and newer. So it's relatively new and there's no IRIX implementation. At least in the current implementation, only meta data is protected with a CRC32 checksum.

jpstewart wrote: (Aside: don't you just love the way the "version 2" on-disk format was introduced with what the kernel calls "version 4"? I guess consistent numbering is over-rated.)

internal and marketing names often differ for many reasons.

duck wrote:

tingo wrote: Since it hasn't been mentioned here yet: NetBSD also has support for xfs. Or had, the release I used back when I tried it a few years ago is very old now, I haven't kept up with NetBSD developments since then.

I'm pretty sure that NetBSD has never supported xfs (there certainly isn't any support in the source tree I have checked out, which should be HEAD somewhere around 7.99.13). There is support for efs and the sgi volume headers though, perhaps you were thinking of that?

Possible mix up with efs here, yes.

Not sure it was mentioned but RHEL 7 / Centos 7 default FS is XFS these days, but there may be a version compatibility issues as pointed out.