Hacker News Reader

Comment by tharkun__ | Hacker News Reader

XFS is a default filesystem in a production system? Really?

XFS was dead to me 20 years ago. The only time I ever actually verifiably lost data to a system crash was on XFS. I had actual zero length files with XFS after a crash. Lost actual data. But the file system was in totally happy consistent metadata state. Never ever would I ever consider that filesystem ever again.

The ominous "reisserfs" everyone complained about? Never lost a single byte of data to it even when I pulled the plug in the middle of a write operation to test it. No issues with ext4, no experience with btrfs.

View on HN

You may not believe it but it is true: https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...

I vaguely know some of the backstory of moving off ext4 (as default). As I understood it at the time, it was less focused on some of the larger systems Red Hat was interested in.

The main problem with ReiserFS is Reiser killed his wife so it is unmaintained.

There is that. I think ReiserSF used to be the default that SUSE used. These days, it seems to be btrfs for root and XFS for everything else.

That's why I called it "reisserFS" and not reiserfs. I am well aware of the controversies because of what he did on the non-technical side. I am also of course for a very long time by now not using it any longer.

I was merely talking about the experience with XFS "back in the day" and yes I was on reiserfs and then XFS "came up" and I changed my home partition to that, coz I was looking to move off of reisserfs. Power outage. Boom, lost half my home dir. Suddenly lots of totally fine metadata wise files had null length. I did go back to reiserfs until ext4 was stable enough after that. I will never try XFS ever again, sorry. Loosing data is the thing that a file system can't do to me if they want to "retain my business" so to speak.

And yes, reiserfs I actually tested and had survive some power outages totally fine too. I believed the XFS hype too much without proper testing. My bad I guess in that sense. We were all young once. But also: Never again XFS ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com