What was worrying was that the XFS dataloss was due an action totally out of our hands: a power outage at a substation which took out a whole area of the city. The whole datacentre lost power, and the XFS filesystems on some massive storage arrays were completely hosed. Just from power loss. It took days to put it all back from tape backups. XFS has long been known to have problems with unclean shutdowns, but total loss from a power outage is about as bad as it gets.
These were all on Gentoo, so with relatively recent tools and vanilla kernels.
The only filesystems that I never had problems with were ext4 and reiserfs.
That was exactly the FS that eat my data back in ~2005. Never had problems with XFS or ZFS. With Btrfs well i just use it regularly since 2 years so i cant say much, but i think Redhat chose XFS for a reason.
At some level, they must understand that both XFS and LVM are over 25 years old, and when compared with e.g. ZFS, are completely outclassed. Their current efforts developing Stratis, which is an attempt to provide more ZFS-like functionality by extending XFS, adding LVM thin pools, and managing it all with an unholy complex combination of daemons, D-BUS and Python looks like a logical progression based upon what they have to hand in house, but a strategic mistake when it can never approach ZFS in functionality or reliability simply because these technologies can only be extended so far because of fundamental design limitations. I'll be morbidly interested to see what they can stretch XFS to do. But I won't be using it myself.
What I find really surprising here is that Linux in general, and RedHat in particular, don't have a competitive filesystem to offer. There is absolutely nothing which matches ZFS.
Not sure if you would risk your customers data just because of that. I never had any problems with XFS.
>At some level, they must understand that both XFS and LVM are over 25 years old
Being a User of ZFS (on FreeBSD) myself, zfs is not much younger 2006.
>and RedHat in particular, don't have a competitive filesystem to offer.
That i really don't understand too. Maybe they think for "small" stuff HW-Raid or LVM is good enough and everything bigger is Ceph or Gluster anyway.
