I know a lot about XFS performance. Unfortunately, it's hard to split out
what parts are XFS and what parts are IRIX infrastructure.
Some parts of XFS are amazing (actually, it isn't XFS that's so fast, it's
XLV - the volume manager underneath - XFS does its part by getting out of
the way and letting XLV set up all the DMAs in parallel). The I/O bandwidth
that you can get out of XFS/XLV is limited only by the hardware. When I was
at SGI they demoed XFS doing 7GByte/second and there is no reason why that
number couldn't be 7TByte/second.
The journalling is nice - it's nowhere near as fast as ext2 but it is safe,
you can turn off the machine the middle of an untar and things are in a
sane state when you reboot. I strongly suspect that Stephen's journalling
work will be lighter weight.
XFS is extent based so you could have a 10TB file that was made up of
a small number of extents, very nice.
I suspect that what will happen is that we'll get XFS, take a while
to understand it and then migrate the ideas that we want into ext3 or
whatever Stephen is calling his thing. For a lot of stuff, XFS is
overkill and it comes at a non-zero cost.
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/