Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2008 17:07:06 -0500 (CDT) From: Kevin Monceaux <Kevin@RawFedDogs.net> To: FreeBSD Questions <Questions@FreeBSD.org> Subject: "New" user with a possible ZFS problem Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.1.10.0807021643150.19153@Blaidd-Drwg.RawFedDogs.net>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
FreeBSD Fans, Okay, I'm not exactly a "new" user. I've been running FreeBSD for about a year or so on my web/mail server, which I only have remote access to. It's currently running 6.3. Saturday I finally found one of those "round tuits" and switched my home PC from Debian to FreeBSD. I've been a Linux user since the 1.xx Linux kernel days, so it took quite a bit of convincing myself to make the switch. But other than needing to unlearn some bad habits I got into thanks to Linux, I'm feeling right at home. After getting a taste of ZFS while trying out OpenSolaris Indiana under VMware, I decided to give FreeBSD's ZFS implementation a try. Actually before installing FreeBSD I tried a native OpenSolaris Indiana install briefly, but ended up deciding it's new package system wasn't quite ready for prime time yet. Do I really need ZFS? Not really. But after getting a taste of ZFS it'd be hard to go back to "regular" file systems. I've had a couple of problems and I'm not sure if there ZFS related or not. When I switched my PC to FreeBSD this past Saturday I went by the article located at: http://www.ish.com.au/solutions/articles/freebsdzfs to set up ZFS. I followed the article's loader.conf tweaks advice and added: vm.kmem_size_max="512M" vm.kmem_size="512M" vfs.zfs.zil_disable=1 to /boot/loader.conf. All went well at first, then eventually I experienced my first hang. If I remember correctly, I had an mp3 playing via mplayer and was moving a large file from one ZFS "partition" to another. Both the mp3 player and mv command appeared to hang. Checking top one of the processes was in a zfs:lo state and the other was, I think, in a zfs:&b state, or something similar. I forget which was which. Eventually they recovered. Eventually I encountered a similar hang with similar symptoms. The second hang might have eventually recovered on it's own but I finally resorted to hitting the power switch. After a little Googling on the process states I tried adding: vfs.zfs.prefetch_disable="1" to /boot/loader.conf. After doing so I gave ZFS a bit of a workout. I shuffled some large files around, etc., and all appeared well. When I went to bed this morning, I had to work graveyards last night, I had an openoffice.org build running, which had been running for eight hours or so. Okay, although I usually install everything from ports maybe I should go with the binary package for OpenOffice. Anyway, when I got up this afternoon my PC was completely locked up. I had no video signal, caps lock and num lock wouldn't change the keyboard LEDs, etc. I finally resorted to hitting the power button. After getting things back up, I freebsd-updated to 7.0-RELEASE-p2, after some Googling and commenting out the chflag calls in freebsd-update. I know, I should have checked for updates right after I finished installing FreeBSD. Anyway, does the above hangs all sound like they're ZFS related. Are there any other settings I should try? Is there a FreeBSD ZFS mailing list? I searched but couldn't find one. Kevin http://www.RawFedDogs.net http://www.WacoAgilityGroup.org Bruceville, TX Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes. Longum iter est per praecepta, breve et efficax per exempla!!!
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?alpine.BSF.1.10.0807021643150.19153>