[sles-beta] Why is the default XFS for home directory?

[Matthias G. Eckermann]

Hello Darren and all,

On 2014-02-25 T 22:08 +1100 Darren Thompson wrote:
 
> I chose the "default" partitoning and noticed that the
> /home partition was created as an XFS filesystem.
> 
> I understand the choice for BTRFS for the root volume
> (sapper integration/roll back etc) but was wondering
> what rational was used to set the default home
> partition as XFS?
> 
> On of the "advertised" features of SLES12 was the
> BTRFS/SAMBA 4.X VSS integration. That would assume
> that the SAMBA host file-system was BTRFS, since home
> directories are one of the "default" SAMBA shares it
> seems a strange combination.
> 
> It's not really a "bug" it just seems to be an odd
> defalut choice so i was wondering what the rational
> was for that default.
 
it is a deliberate choice to suggest XFS as the default
for "/home"; we will explain the rationale in the beta
call about filesystems on 2014-03-10.

As a hint: the decision is related to characteristics
and behaviour of copy-on-write filesystems and the goal
to provide the "average administrator" with "least
surprise" when installing and running SUSE Linux
Enterprise 12 in production.

However, btrfs certainly is supported for "/home" and
other volumes, we just require the administrator to make
the explicit decision to use btrfs instead of XFS here.

So long -
	MgE


-- 
Matthias G. Eckermann     Senior Product Manager   SUSE® Linux Enterprise
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