[rescue] Oracle making just a little harder to keep old machines in use

[Meelis Roos]

> Sustained streaming reads are "easy". I stuffed six 1.5TB disks into a Linux
> box, slapped md RAID6, LVM and then ext4 on top, and it throws DVD images
> around at the speed of the underlying storage.

Not so easy - almost any filesystem can sustain one streaming reader or 
writer but the benchmarks have shown that XFS can sustain several of 
them, divinding the performance between them quite evenly. Most others 
in Linux (the ones modeled more or less directly around UFS) lose the 
performance quickly with several concurrent streamers.

XFS has been solid for me on a few systems where I have it, but several 
friends have ocassionaly had different kinds of failures. Like Buffalo 
NAS box with ARM+Linux where one power loss brought the need to repair 
the filesystem and another power loss thrashed the filesystem badly. Or 
file IO errors on one disk that fsck-s fine, tests fine but has errors 
with 2.6.31 and 2.6.32 kernels (the earlier ones work). So SGI is still 
developing it but ocassionally stumbles.

-- 
Meelis Roos (mroos at linux.ee)