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Date:      Sun, 28 Sep 2008 21:00:25 -0700
From:      Jeremy Chadwick <koitsu@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Zaphod Beeblebrox <zbeeble@gmail.com>
Cc:        Derek Kuli?ski <takeda@takeda.tk>, freebsd-stable@freebsd.org, Clint Olsen <clint.olsen@gmail.com>, pjd@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: UNEXPECTED SOFT UPDATE INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY
Message-ID:  <20080929040025.GA97332@icarus.home.lan>
In-Reply-To: <5f67a8c40809282030l7888d942q548d570cd0b33be9@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <20080921213426.GA13923@0lsen.net> <20080921215203.GC9494@icarus.home.lan> <20080921215930.GA25826@0lsen.net> <20080921220720.GA9847@icarus.home.lan> <249873145.20080926213341@takeda.tk> <20080927051413.GA42700@icarus.home.lan> <765067435.20080926223557@takeda.tk> <20080927064417.GA43638@icarus.home.lan> <588787159.20080927003750@takeda.tk> <5f67a8c40809282030l7888d942q548d570cd0b33be9@mail.gmail.com>

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On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 11:30:01PM -0400, Zaphod Beeblebrox wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 27, 2008 at 3:37 AM, Derek Kuli?ski <takeda@takeda.tk> wrote:
> 
> >
> > > ZFS is the first filesystem, to my knowledge, which provides 1) a
> > > reliable filesystem, 2) detection of filesystem problems in real-time or
> > > during scrubbing, 3) repair of problems in real-time (assuming raidz1 or
> > > raidz2 are used), and 4) does not need fsck.  This makes ZFS powerful.
> >
> 
> While I am very enthusiastic about ZFS (and use it for certain tasks), there
> are several things preventing me from recommending it as a general-purpose
> filesystem (and none of them are specific to FreeBSD's port of it).
> 
> As a large NAS filestore, ZFS seems very well designed.  That is, if the
> goal is to store a very large amount of files with data integrity and serve
> them up over the network, ZFS achieves it with aplomb.
> 
> However, as a core general purpose filesystem, it seems to have flaws, not
> the least of which is a re-separation of file cache and memory cache.  This
> virtually doesn't matter for a fileserver, but is generally important in a
> general purpose local filesystem.  ZFS also has a transactional nature ---
> which probably, again, works well in a fileserver, but I find (as a local
> filesystem) it introduces unpredicable delays as the buffer fills up and
> then gets flushed en masse.

I'm curious to know how Solaris deals with these problems, since the
default filesystem (AFAIK) in OpenSolaris is now ZFS.  CC'ing pjd@ who
might have some insight there.

> This is not to say that general purpose filesystems couldn't head in the ZFS
> direction, or that ZFS is anthing but an amazing piece of technology, but
> UFS and UFS+SU have not outlived their usefulness yet.
> 
> Maybe support for odd block sizes in UFS would allow geom to manufacture
> checksums (by subtracting their size from the source block).  This would be
> the last link in the chain to provide gjournal + gmirror + gchecksum
> (addressing points 1, 2, 3 and 4). Equally, maybe gchecksum could work like
> gjournal.  Dunno --- that would probably be expensive in io ops.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |




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