XFS has been stable on Linux for over a decade (since SGI Linux, which was RHEL with XFS, in the early 2000s). btrfs while having some design advantages over XFS and ZFS is still too new for most of Red Hat's customers.
XFS was pretty good in the olden days of IRIX - as in twenty years ago when 2Gb SCSI disks were pretty much all you had to work with.
The small disks of that time and the fact that you weren't running a 'DOS' file system meant that formatting disks for some new partition was par for the course and a regular task. There were GUI tools to make it easy but invariably the command line was how things got done. Clearly there were unusual SGI users that needed 'peta-byte' sized file systems and XFS was designed with those guys in mind. So, one way or another, XFS has been thoroughly tested, the small disks of that time probably helped with that as more disk chores were needed.
I am glad to see some SGI making it into mainstream linux computing.
I'm one of those people who had to deal with an XFS corruption about ten years ago, and the recovery process was messy - to say the least. At least with ext4, the recovery is easier to manage.
I'm still scarred by it.
This actually makes me happier with my decision to use FreeBSD and ZFS for a recent file server. I'll still use RHEL/CentOS for client nodes, but they'll all be using the ZFS export for storage.
I had the same experience over 10 years ago - and I was actually at SGI back then.
But that was then. This is now. I'm curious how things have changed meanwhile. I'm going to give this thing a spin.
I also remember the massive performance and effortless delivery of XFS under concurrent access, while using large files. That was fantastic. I would expect that's still the case now.
Of course I'm going to have a bad taste in my mouth for XFS. Because it happened to me. At the time is was particularly frustrating because XFS was claimed to be very stable and should be used over ext3(? I don't remember if ext4 was out yet). Our group ended up moving all of those machines over to ext3/4 and we were quite happy with the results.
I remember when Joyent had their problem, and it made me hedge on ZFS for quite a while as well. Some time working with both Solaris and FreeBSD implementations in production was enough to change my mind.
I'm sure that XFS now-a-days is much more stable - Redhat wouldn't make it the default filesystem if it wasn't. Just because I had a bad experience with it many years ago doesn't mean that I won't use it, but I will evaluate if I need to.
But, I honestly wonder how much longer it will be the default with Btrfs coming along quickly.
