From owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Thu May 5 12:07:55 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 179A616A4CF for ; Thu, 5 May 2005 12:07:55 +0000 (GMT) Received: from anduin.net (anduin.net [212.12.46.226]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9AA6343D6A for ; Thu, 5 May 2005 12:07:54 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from ltning@anduin.net) Received: from ranger.anduin.net ([81.0.162.52] helo=[192.168.1.110]) by anduin.net with esmtpa (Exim 4.50 (FreeBSD)) id 1DTf8z-000GtJ-33 for stable@freebsd.org; Thu, 05 May 2005 14:07:53 +0200 User-Agent: Microsoft-Entourage/11.1.0.040913 Date: Thu, 05 May 2005 14:06:48 +0200 From: Eirik =?ISO-8859-1?B?2A==?=verby To: "stable@freebsd.org" Message-ID: Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Subject: Current status of nullfs and/or unionfs? X-BeenThere: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Production branch of FreeBSD source code List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 05 May 2005 12:07:55 -0000 Hi all, I'm struggling with some hosting environments where I am managing a large number of jails (>100) spread over about a dozen servers. I am starting to see disk space as a real problem, especially given that each physical box needs to be autonomous - i.e. I can't rely on any external storage, and I am limited to 1U and 2U servers. The solution, or at least parts of it, would be to have certain parts of the jail filesystems mounted in via nullfs (acceptable solution) or unionfs (ideal solution). However, ever since FreeBSD 4.10 this has been a major problem, as both filesystems started exhibiting major stability and data integrity issues. Before I start playing with this again, I'd like to know if any work has been done on either of these in 5.x. Specifically, I'm currently running 5.3-p6 or newer on all the systems, and as of yesterday I've been using 5.4-prerelease (cvsup) on a couple of test systems. What can I expect to see when trying nullfs and/or unionfs today? Has anything changed? Do I have even a remote chance of making it work - and if it doesn't work, what are my chances of anyone having time or energy to look into it? I'm an admin only, no coder, otherwise I'd be happy to look into it myself. Thanks, /Eirik