[plug] xfs errors?

[Brad Campbell]

On 19/7/22 20:30, William Kenworthy wrote:

> Hi, another view:
> 
> I am using xfs on some old drives (WDgreen, red and seagate ironwolf) and newer M.2 and sata SSD  on an intel system for moosefs.  The the old drives are using odroid HC2 units (arm based, builtin USB3 to sata interface) Occaisionally one of the arm systems randomly fails to boot and invariably the xfs on that one is corrupt.  If xfs_repair fixes it within a shortish time its ok as moosefs will pickup and fix any corrupt files.  Otherwise I just reformat and let moosefs backfill it - faster that way!  I did try btrfs when initially setting it up, but found xfs more stable at the time.
> 
> I have found that ext4 is a somewhat fragile file-system when using hardlink based backups via "dirvish" - to the point it was a waste of time using it.  It seems better these days, but I used reiserfs and then btrfs with a lot better results (as in avoiding rampant filesystem corruption after only a few backup runs)
> 
> XFS has an experimental online scrub type system xfs_scrub that might be a good idea if its accumulating small errors at a constant rate but I have no experience in using it.
> 
> BillK
> 

G'day Bill,

Yes, you mentioned moosefs back in 2020 and I did go and have a look at the time. Unfortunately immediately after than personal excrement happened and I had to get running fast, so I went with xfs and a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then.

Despite the painful and long xfs_repair, there is/was nothing wrong with the visible structure or data on the filesystem and had I not unmounted it for a "quick" check I'm sure it'd still be plugging away. ext4 did a respectable job and I never had any consistency issues. It was more about the time to traverse a metadata heavy fs.

I might treat this as a trigger to go and have another look at moosefs. I also intend on playing with xfs_scrub now I have a current filesystem with the right bits (it's not as effective on the v4 on-disk format).

Always appreciate a different perspective. 

Regards,
Brad