I use XFS everywhere I can: out of the box, it requires no tuning to get near maximum performance, yet I generally have to tune ext3/4 to get what I want (and, largely, I still consider that a bit of voodoo).
Problem is, I run a dedicated server hosting company, and the majority of my customers either want CentOS 6.x or Debian Stable. Neither can install XFS as the root filesystem (but can use it for other filesystems during install, strangely enough; separate ext2/3/4 /boot doesn't fix the issue).
At home I have a mini-server that is 2x M550 128GB SSD, 2x es.2 2TB HDD, with the SSDs partitioned as 16GB md raid1 XFS for /, 256MB for ZFS ZIL, rest for ZFS L2ARC, and the 2x2TB as ZFS mirror; /tank and /home are on ZFS, and / is pretty much empty.
The only thing that would improve XFS at this point is if it supported optional checksumming and LZ4 compression on root filesystems, otherwise its basically perfect.
By the way, said mini-server? Dual core Haswell 3.x GHz, 16GB of DDR3-1600, from pressing the power button, going through BIOS, hammering enter to get past grub menu as fast as possible, it takes about 7 seconds to get to the login prompt; less than 3 of that is between leaving grub and getting to the prompt.
> Problem is, I run a dedicated server hosting company, and the majority of my customers either want CentOS 6.x or Debian Stable. Neither can install XFS as the root filesystem
FYI, I've got many machines running Debian Stable (wheezy) with xfs root filesystems, no /boot partition. No problems.
I just installed on to a brand new VM from debian-7.8.0-amd64-CD-1.iso. Selected manual partitioning, set a bootable XFS partition, installed and ran fine.
Do you have a Debian bug ID? D-I has been doing XFS root installs for me for years now, whether it's interactively with the netinst ISO in VMware or remotely with the debian-installer-netboot package, a DHCP server, and an unattended installer preseed file.
I just tested it again. XFS now works. It did not work the most recent time I tried (within the past 12 months). The only change in my preseed file I made to test the change was the expert_recipe stanza for /, from ext4 filesystem { ext4 } to xfs filesystem { xfs }.
Thanks for getting me to test again. One less OS I have to deal with that can't do XFS properly.
A few have asked when I'm going to offer CentOS 7. My reply? When it actually works with my deployment system properly and isn't a colossal buggy mess, and actually works with the software you (my customers) use (a lot of things have not announced CentOS 7 support for the same reasons I have, its a buggy mess).
I'm not a CentOS admin, but I know a lot of CentOS admins. The concept of Linux distro problems is kind of foreign to me: I'm a Debian guy, the most problems we've had in the past 5 years has been pretty much just systemd (which I file away as "systemd sucks" isuses, not Debian issues).
Basically, everything they've said boils down to package deps are broken and theres no easy way to fix it, and random segfaults and kernel panics (which I have no idea why any distro would ever have this issue).
Problem is, I run a dedicated server hosting company, and the majority of my customers either want CentOS 6.x or Debian Stable. Neither can install XFS as the root filesystem (but can use it for other filesystems during install, strangely enough; separate ext2/3/4 /boot doesn't fix the issue).
At home I have a mini-server that is 2x M550 128GB SSD, 2x es.2 2TB HDD, with the SSDs partitioned as 16GB md raid1 XFS for /, 256MB for ZFS ZIL, rest for ZFS L2ARC, and the 2x2TB as ZFS mirror; /tank and /home are on ZFS, and / is pretty much empty.
The only thing that would improve XFS at this point is if it supported optional checksumming and LZ4 compression on root filesystems, otherwise its basically perfect.
By the way, said mini-server? Dual core Haswell 3.x GHz, 16GB of DDR3-1600, from pressing the power button, going through BIOS, hammering enter to get past grub menu as fast as possible, it takes about 7 seconds to get to the login prompt; less than 3 of that is between leaving grub and getting to the prompt.