From owner-freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Sep 21 12:12:40 2007 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8684816A417 for ; Fri, 21 Sep 2007 12:12:40 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from se@FreeBSD.org) Received: from spacemail2-out.mgmt.space.net (spacemail2-out.mgmt.Space.Net [194.97.149.148]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0CADD13C474 for ; Fri, 21 Sep 2007 12:12:39 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from se@FreeBSD.org) X-SpaceNet-SBRS: None X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.20,283,1186351200"; d="scan'208";a="53864237" Received: from mail.atsec.com ([195.30.252.105]) by spacemail2-out.mgmt.space.net with ESMTP; 21 Sep 2007 14:12:39 +0200 Received: from [10.2.2.88] (frueh.atsec.com [217.110.13.170]) (Authenticated sender: se@atsec.com) by mail.atsec.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 94988720A68; Fri, 21 Sep 2007 14:12:38 +0200 (CEST) Message-ID: <46F3B520.1070708@FreeBSD.org> Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2007 14:12:16 +0200 From: Stefan Esser User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.6 (Windows/20070728) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Ivan Voras References: <46F3A64C.4090507@fluffles.net> In-Reply-To: X-Enigmail-Version: 0.95.3 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Writing contigiously to UFS2? X-BeenThere: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Filesystems List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2007 12:12:40 -0000 Ivan Voras wrote: > Fluffles wrote: > >> Even worse: data is being stored at weird locations, so that my energy >> efficient NAS project becomes crippled. Even with the first 400GB of >> data, it's storing that on the first 4 disks in my concat configuration, > >> In the past when testing geom_raid5 I've tried to tune newfs >> parameters so that it would write contiguously but still there were >> regular 2-phase writes which mean data was not written contiguously. I >> really dislike this behavior. > > I agree, this is my least favorite aspect of UFS (maybe together with > nonimplementation of extents), for various reasons. I feel it's time to > start heavy lobbying for finishing FreeBSD's implementations of XFS and > raiserfs :) > > (ZFS is not the ultimate solution: 1) replacing UFS monoculture with ZFS > monoculture will sooner or later yield problems, and 2) sometimes a > "dumb" unix filesystem is preferred to the "smart" ZFS). Both XFS and ReiserFS are quite complex compared to UFS definitely not well described by the term "dumb" ;-) The FFS paper by McKusick et.al describes the historical allocation strategy, which was somewhat modified in FreeBSD a few years ago in order to adapt to modern disk sizes (larger cylinder groups, meaning it is not a good idea to create each new directory in a new cylinder group). The code that implements the block layout strategy is easily found in the sources and can be modified without too much risk to your file systems consistency ... Regards, STefan