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.