What This Guide Contains

What This Guide Contains

The types of disks, filesystems, and logical volumes covered in this guide are:

SCSI disks. Systems that run IRIX 6.2 or later use only SCSI disks.
The Extent File System(TM) (EFS). The EFS filesystem, a filesystem developed by Silicon Graphics, has been the filesystem used by IRIX for many years.
The XFS filesystem. The XFS filesystem, a high-performance alternative to EFS developed by Silicon Graphics, was first released for IRIX 5.3.
lv logical volumes. The lv logical volume system provides basic logical volumes and has been available in IRIX for many years. Support for lv logical volumes will be dropped in a future IRIX release.
XLV logical volumes. The XLV logical volume system, a high-performance logical volume system with many advanced features was developed by Silicon Graphics and released first for IRIX 5.3.

This guide is organized into chapters that provide reference information (the "concepts" chapters) and chapters that give procedures for performing disk and filesystem administration tasks. An appendix provides in-depth information about the command fsck. These chapters and appendix are:

Chapter 1, "Disk Concepts," provides information about the structure of disks, disk partitioning, and disk partition device files.
Chapter 2, "Performing Disk Administration Procedures," describes disk administration tasks such as listing disks, initializing disks, modifying volume headers, repartitioning disks, creating device files, and adding new disks to systems.
Chapter 3, "Filesystem Concepts," provides information about the IRIX filesystem layout, general filesystem concepts, details of the EFS and XFS filesystem types, and discussions of creating, mounting, checking, and growing filesystems.
Chapter 4, "Creating and Growing Filesystems," describes filesystem administration procedures such as making filesystems, mounting them, growing them, and converting from EFS to XFS.
Chapter 5, "Maintaining Filesystems," describes filesystem administration procedures that need to be performed routinely or on an as-needed basis, such as checking filesystems and managing disk usage when the amount of free disk space is low.
Chapter 6, "Logical Volume Concepts," describes the general concepts of logical volumes and the specifics of lv and XLV logical volumes.
Chapter 7, "Creating and Administering XLV Logical Volumes," provides administration procedures for creating and administering XLV logical volumes and converting lv logical volumes to XLV.
Chapter 8, "Creating and Administering lv Logical Volumes," provides administration procedures for creating and administering lv logical volumes.
Chapter 9, "System Administration for Guaranteed-Rate I/O," provides information about guaranteed-rate I/O and the administration procedures required to support its use by applications.
Appendix A, "Repairing EFS Filesystem ProblemsWith fsck," provides detailed information about using fsck.