Re: New Linux xfs/reiser file systems

Lincoln Yeoh wrote:
>
> At 02:09 AM 5/4/01 -0500, Thomas Swan wrote:
> > I think it's worth noting that Oracle has been petitioning the
> > kernel developers for better raw device support: in other words,
> > the ability to write directly to the hard disk and bypassing the
> > filesystem all together.
>
> But there could be other reasons why Oracle would want to do raw stuff.
>
> 1) They have more things to sell - management modules/software. More
> training courses. Certified blahblahblah. More features in brochure.
> 2) It just helps make things more proprietary. Think lock in.
>
> All that for maybe 10% performance increase?
>
> I think it's more advantageous for Postgresql to keep the filesystem layer
> of abstraction, than to do away with it, and later reinvent certain parts
> of it along with new bugs.

I just did a test of putting pg_xlog on a FAT file system, and my first rough
tests (pgbench) show an approximate 20% performance increase over ext2 with
fsync enabled.

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