vxfs vs ufs
Hello,
I have got a V240 Server with a large ufs Filesystem (500 GByte, about 1000000 Files). This is a ufs Filesystem mounted with the logging option. The Server has got a panic. Because of that the filesystem was corrupt, the ufs log was not usable. I had to check the filesystem three times until no more modifications by fsck occured. This took about 14 Hours.
My Questions are: is the vxfs more stable after a crash? Does someone have experience with vxfs and panics?
Rehards
Frank
[524 byte] By [
frank@ddm] at [2007-11-25 23:36:45]
# 1
Do you know what caused the panic? Both UFS and VxFS have the capability of using logs, but those logs are only useful for maintaining consistency in the face of a simple system crash.
If prior to the crash the filesystem became corrupted either on the disk or in memory, then the log isn't useful. That's true for both.
Theres no generalizing across 'panics'. They shouldn't normally happen, and you'd want to know the root cause.
I haven't heard many tales of either the UFS or or VxFS logs failing in the case of simple crashes. There do seem to be a few more bugs surrounding UFS and logging, but it's a somewhat more recent product. I certainly use it in production on many hosts.
--
Darren
# 2
if you have a huge filesystem then using vxfs makes sense as fsck will be a breeze, but vxfs is not infallable, I have had system panics due to total backend disk storage crashes which resulted in corrupted filesystems and I lost everything.
# 3
Plenty of FS corruptions are caused by bad hardware, which will give you a problem no matter if you are running ufs or vxfs.
I don't really like vxfs; one of the reasons is that i don't like putting my data behind a license key, the other reason is that if something goes bad i have yet one more supplier to talk to, and the more suppliers you have on a single system, the more likely it is that they will just blame eachother.
