[fedora-arm] Changing / from xfs to ext4 ?

[linux guy]

I'm using an RPi with Fedora 27 (of course !) in an environment where it
sometimes loses power and shuts down prematurely. This has a tendency to
corrupt the xfs filesystem that / resides on.

As most of you probably know, it is much, much easier to repair a file
system error with other file systems, ext4, for example. It is very time
consuming to repair an error on an xfs file system.

What would be the disadvantage to mounting / on an ext4 fs rather than xfs
? What changes would be needed elsewhere to acomodate this ?

Thanks.

Special thanks to the Fedora arm people for all their hard work !

[Peter Robinson]

Post by linux guy
I'm using an RPi with Fedora 27 (of course !) in an environment where it
sometimes loses power and shuts down prematurely. This has a tendency to
corrupt the xfs filesystem that / resides on.
As most of you probably know, it is much, much easier to repair a file
system error with other file systems, ext4, for example. It is very time
consuming to repair an error on an xfs file system.
What would be the disadvantage to mounting / on an ext4 fs rather than xfs ?
What changes would be needed elsewhere to acomodate this ?

You're using the Server image right? It's the only one of the images
that use xfs and it uses that because that's the defaults for the
Server WG, you could use a minimal image which uses ext4 and still
achieve what you're after.

Peter
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[linux guy]

Thanks for the reply, Peter. I'll start over with a different image.

Post by Peter Robinson

Post by linux guy
I'm using an RPi with Fedora 27 (of course !) in an environment where it
sometimes loses power and shuts down prematurely. This has a tendency to
corrupt the xfs filesystem that / resides on.
As most of you probably know, it is much, much easier to repair a file
system error with other file systems, ext4, for example. It is very time
consuming to repair an error on an xfs file system.
What would be the disadvantage to mounting / on an ext4 fs rather than

xfs ?

Post by linux guy
What changes would be needed elsewhere to acomodate this ?

You're using the Server image right? It's the only one of the images
that use xfs and it uses that because that's the defaults for the
Server WG, you could use a minimal image which uses ext4 and still
achieve what you're after.
Peter

[Gerard Braad]

Wouldn't it be also simpler to solve the power issue? In this case using a
battery pack in between would possibly buffer the outages

[Peter Robinson]

Post by Gerard Braad
Wouldn't it be also simpler to solve the power issue? In this case using a
battery pack in between would possibly buffer the outages

I'm not aware of any usb battery packs that can charge/discharge at the
same time, they tend to be one or the other

[Gerard Braad]

My Lenovo battery pack does, as almost all of the Chinese stuff.

Post by Peter Robinson
I'm not aware of any usb battery packs that can charge/discharge at the

same time, they tend to be one or the other

[David Marlin]

Post by Gerard Braad
Wouldn't it be also simpler to solve the power issue? In this case
using a battery pack in between would possibly buffer the outages
I'm not aware of any usb battery packs that can charge/discharge at
the same time, they tend to be one or the other

Perhaps install a small UPS, just to filter out glitches and brief power
outages?

Post by Gerard Braad
--
   Gerard Braad | http://gbraad.nl
   [ Doing Open Source Matters ]
_______________________________________________
_______________________________________________

[linux guy]

Not sure about easier per se, but it would be an option.


​

[Peter Portante]

Adding Eric to comment as well ...

Post by linux guy
I'm using an RPi with Fedora 27 (of course !) in an environment where it
sometimes loses power and shuts down prematurely. This has a tendency to
corrupt the xfs filesystem that / resides on.
As most of you probably know, it is much, much easier to repair a file
system error with other file systems, ext4, for example. It is very time
consuming to repair an error on an xfs file system.
What would be the disadvantage to mounting / on an ext4 fs rather than xfs
? What changes would be needed elsewhere to acomodate this ?
Thanks.
Special thanks to the Fedora arm people for all their hard work !
_______________________________________________

[Eric Sandeen]

Post by linux guy
I'm using an RPi with Fedora 27 (of course !) in an environment where
it sometimes loses power and shuts down prematurely. This has a
tendency to corrupt the xfs filesystem that / resides on.

Is there something unique about the hardware that causes this?
It really shouldn't happen - that's what the journal in both xfs and ext4
is for - to replay after a power failure and keep metadata consistent.

What kind of corruption are you seeing?

Generally if a power loss causes filesystem corruption on either xfs or
ext4, it's due to a storage problem. (Unless by corruption you mean
lost buffered IOs, which is really an application issue.)

Post by linux guy
As most of you probably know, it is much, much easier to repair a
file system error with other file systems, ext4, for example. It is
very time consuming to repair an error on an xfs file system.

Can you expand on this? What kind of repairs are you talking about?
Generally xfs_repair is at least as fast as e2fsck.

Thanks,
-Eric

Post by linux guy
What would be the disadvantage to mounting / on an ext4 fs rather
than xfs ? What changes would be needed elsewhere to acomodate this
?

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[linux guy]

​I'm not sure what the error is exactly. I just know that a) it is
happening and b) this process is more than I want to get into.
https://serverfault.com/questions/777299/proper-way-to-deal-with-corrupt-xfs-filesystems
.

[Eric Sandeen]

​I'm not sure what the error is exactly.  I just know that a) it is happening and b) this process is more than I want to get into.  https://serverfault.com/questions/777299/proper-way-to-deal-with-corrupt-xfs-filesystems.

If you can provide relevant information about what you are actually
encountering (as opposed to unvetted howtos on the internet) I'd be
more than happy to help.

In general, though the howto is not far off but covers more than you
need. Just:

1) run xfs_repair
2) if repair tells you you have a dirty log to replay, mount/unmount & rerun
3) if mount fails with a corrupt log, run xfs_repair -L to clear it

This isn't much different from ext4 other than the fact that repair
can't replay a dirty log and it requires a mount/umount cycle.

Again, all of this indicates a deeper problem; xfs is the victim of some
other flaw if power loss requires repair.

Thanks,
-Eric
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