RHEL 5 supports XFS out of box
I was trying to figure out how to get XFS working on a RHEL box at work so that we could store more than 16TB on a filesystem, and found Gianpolo Del Matto’s excellent XFS on RHEL tutorial.
And then I found out that most of that mucking around in the kernel build process isn’t necessary.
RHEL5 u6 (at least my copies — note that I have the -xen kernel packages installed, which might affect things) actually has the XFS kernel module in /lib/modules/kernel/fs/xfs — it just doesn’t have the xfsprogs package, and the xfsprogs package is not available via any supported means. I downloaded the xfsprogs srpm from the XFS project page and used rpmbuild to build and install it myself.
Does anyone else in this day and age find it ridiculous that Redhat does not support filesystems larger than 16TB without some form of hackery? I can buy that much disk storage at my local Office Depot.
Note that I’m pretty sure that the mount option ‘inode64′ is required if you’re over 16TB, and that 32-bit NFS clients do not like the inode64 option one tiny bit.
FYI, XFS -is- fully supported on RHEL5 now, with no hackery. It is an add-on channel, so xfsprogs lives in another subscription channel.
Your friendly Red Hat Support people should be able to guide you.
-Eric
Hi Michael: There are some special phteacs you can get to get to 16 TB. It isn’t worth it though if you have a machine that can provide more than 16 TB. This is an issue for Redhat. It appears that they have chosen long ago to market ext3 as good enough , and as good as xfs . Unfortunately, it is not, neither in terms of capacity, nor performance. Now ext4 will be developed. It is an extents based file system . Hmmm where have we heard that before? xfs maybe? I think what we have is a severe case of Not-Invented-Here syndrome. The arguments about being hard to support are specious IMO. But they made their choice, and our large boxes can’t use their kernel without xfs or jfs. Kind of silly, but hey, we never really needed more than 640 kB ram anyway, right? Same argument, different decade, just as wrong.
For what it’s worth, ext4 is slower than ext3, which is slower than xfs. I’d still use XFS over ext4.