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David Kewley wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid200504010857.26985.kewley@gps.caltech.edu"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Oh goody, I get to play devil's advocate. Wait, did I just say RH is the
devil? ;)
No, I don't work with them, just have been a RHL, FC, and now RHEL admin for a
few years, and have been reading mailing lists for a couple of years.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<blockquote cite="mid200504010857.26985.kewley@gps.caltech.edu"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">...
</pre>
</blockquote>
<blockquote cite="mid200504010857.26985.kewley@gps.caltech.edu"
type="cite">It is not meant as a tautology, but as a practical
acknowledgement that if <br>
<pre wrap="">they are to support customers' problems with xfs at the level they'd wish,
then they'd have to hire several people, or spend extensive time to train
several people.
As I recall, the remark about difficulty supporting xfs came from Arjan van ee
Ven, one of their kernel developers.
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Some inherent disadvantages of ext3 show up when you start looking at
large file systems and large files. Xfs has much higher limits. If you
want to build a 30TB file system across a huge disk array attached to a
sizeable SMP machine, can you do it with ext3? (no as of RHEL3). If
you want to work with a 2.5 TB file (part of a recent benchmark we ran),
can you do it with ext3? (no as of RHEL3). Xfs doesn't have a problem
with either of these.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
I don't know what the current limits are, but I'd bet they're relieved.
</pre>
</blockquote>
I was suprised that even though SLES8 had already fixed it for a long
time redhat did not consider<br>
it important to fix the 1TB limit in RHEL3. Maybe because they knew
they were going from the 2.4<br>
to the 2.6 kernel - but there is guaranteed to be a large
RHEL3-customer base that relies on commercial<br>
support of third-party apps that cannot simply be switched over to
RHEL4 and thus are still stuck with it.<br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid200504010857.26985.kewley@gps.caltech.edu"
type="cite">
<blockquote type="cite">
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">If customers show RH that there are real-life needs for xfs that are not
satisfied by ext3, then RH may well be willing to invest in in-house xfs
expertise.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">Unlikely. Customers have been showing a clear need for this for a while
(Sloan sky survey, and many others with huge and high speed data
requirements). Redhat prefers to use the excuse that it is a large and
complex package. Hmmm. So are Xorg, Openoffice, ....
I do not expect Redhat to do this. SuSE has, as have most of the rest
of the major distributions (including the 1 man distribution shops), so
the excuses that one hears are ... well ... probably not the real
reasons. Redhat does not want to promote a competitor to technology it
supports. That seems to be a simpler explanation, and I believe is
better supported by observing their actions.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
That may well be the case; certainly RH has market self-interests to look
after. And I know that folks have voiced similar suspicions about RH many
times regarding many details of technology choices they've made. May be, may
not be, we'll see.
</pre>
</blockquote>
How exactly will we see? <br>
<br>
Besides looking at evidence (itanium vs. opteron support, gnome vs. kde
support,<br>
ext3 vs. xfs support).<br>
<br>
Michael Will<br>
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