ufs write safety

[David Kewley]

Hi all,

Can anyone here provide experience reports or pointers to reports, 
regarding the safety of Linux's write support for Sun UFS?  It is 
marked as experimental and dangerous, but it appears to have been 
around since 1998.  I'm wondering whether this might be one of those 
things that works fine but still carries old labels.

I've googled and found only the same warnings that I would write myself, 
if I only read fs/Kconfig & Documentation/filesystems/ufs.txt.  I tried 
contacting the author, Daniel Pirkl, but his email address listed in 
the code the docs is now invalid.

I have several external RAID arrays that up to now have been attached to 
Sun boxes and formatted with UFS filesystems.  I will be attaching 
these arrays now to a RHEL 4 host.  If I can safely get away with it, 
I'd prefer to keep writing to the UFS volumes, since we're talking 
about several TB of data.  But if writing is still not believed to be 
safe, then I will need to transfer the data to a Linux filesystem with 
spare TB of space, reformat the external filesystems, and move the data 
back (or variations on that plan).  These are filesystems that several 
people use for daily work, so I'd rather avoid the copy time if 
possible.

Any pointers would be very welcome.

Thanks,
David