The Empty

If you know me, you know that I run Linux. If you don't know me: Hi, I run Linux.

Now that introductions are out of the way, once you really know me you'll know that I run Gentoo Linux. The main reason for that is along the lines of why I run Linux in the first place. I like to have control of the technology. I prefer manual transmission over automatic transmission. With Linux, that means I like to be able to tweak settings, install things in a certain and try out new applications and tools.

So over the past weeks I went over the Reiser case and although he seems to be a bit nuts (he killed his wife and stuff), reiserfs was pretty cool. His company, Namesys, is gone and reiserfs will probably die, too. This all fueled my curiosity in running a filesystem other than plain old ext2/3. So my choices were:

• resierfs : wife killing and all makes this not attractive. reiser4 also not stable.
• jfs : Linux implemntation sucks.
• ext4 : Not ready for production environments
• xfs : open sourced SGI IRIX filesystem that uses extents, offers good write performance, multi-threaded, etc.

I'm sure there are other choices (in kernel and userspace), but those are what are in the kernel by default. Anyway, as you can tell by the list and by the title of this post, I went with XFS.

Now, what options to use. After looking through a few guides like this one and what-not, I decided upon leaving defaults for mkfs.xfs except for setting the journal size to 128MB. For mount options, I am using noatime,nodiratime,logbufs=8 to speed things up by not worrying about atime and using 8 log buffers in memory.

The nitty gritty details are that I had to copy all my files to an external drives, boot from CD, create the new filesystem, and then copy everything back (also compile XFS support into the kernel and install the tools). Everything seems to be working fine and seems snappy. I haven't run any benchmarks or anything. I did come upon something that seems minor, but I'll post about that another time.