I am writing this mailing list to share my experiences with capturing video with Linux onto SGI's XFS filesystem. Information about SGI's XFS filesystem may be found at http://linux-xfs.sgi.com/projects/xfs/. I have been looking for a filesystem that meets two criteria: have journaling functionality and be high performance. When I say high performance, I mean able to kick ass at storing large files quickly, as with capturing uncompressed video to disk. I have tried ext2, reiserfs, and XFS. Ext2 is not a journaling filesystem, though its performance seems good. Reiserfs is a journaling filesystem, but its performance in my case was not very good. XFS is a journaling filesystem that seems to smoke both ext2 and reiserfs in performance. So far I have found only two negatives related to XFS. First, it has not been tested extensively by its developers with any kernel other than 2.4.2. 2.4.2 suffers from loop-back device problems, but I am sure XFS will support newer kernels soon. Second, XFS is huge; the driver takes up hundreds of KBs of memory. This does not affect my particular system, though. For hardware, I have a 550Mhz Athlon, a 10,000 RPM SCSI hard drive, and 96 MB of RAM. I am using a cheap Hauppauge WinTV PCI video capture card. Using XFS with this configuration, I am able to capture uncompressed YUV2 encoded QuickTime video at 30 frames per second and a resolution of 640x480 pixels. Neither ext2 or reiserfs seemed to be able to keep up with this. I would like to hear the experience of others with different filesystems and capturing video. Would something like Linux's rawio interface be useful in this field? -- W. Michael Petullo :wq
