(Pleasantly) surprised to see docker in there.
Looking forward to 7 (although XFS by default got me wearing my best surprise! face).
Looking forward to 7 (although XFS by default got me wearing my best surprise! face).
The TL;DR version would be that XFS aims to be get out of your road and provide a big, fast pipe to make optimal use of your available hardware. It does not try to implement end-to-end checksumming, thin provisioning, RAID, data de-duplication, or other overhead.
Dave makes the point that traditionally people characterised XFS as for very high-end workloads, but suggests that commodity hardware is now at the point (in terms of IOPS and transfer rates) that "high end" is now quite affordable, so you should consider it for workstations, laptops, etc.
The XFS authors think it will remain a better choice for certain workloads, such as the modify-in-place work of databases, video editing, and so on, that copy-on-write filesystems like ZFS and btrfs.
1) You need huge filesystems (like 100TB+). 2) You need huge numbers of files per directory (in particular, XFS is much faster at creating the files). 3) You have a workload heavily skewed toward streaming data off the disk.
ZFS does 1 & 3 well. Not as good on 2. And it's less mature on Linux than the other 2. But ZFS also has much more robust data integrity feature than either ext4 or XFS.
P.S. - I migrated most of my stuff from XFS to ZFS this year after many years of using XFS (back when IRIX was a thing). P.S.S. - Never run XFS without battery backup and make sure to force sync data to disk periodically.