FreeBSD 8.1-RC2 Available...

[Cejka Rudolf]

Ken Smith wrote (2010/07/07):
> On Wed, 2010-07-07 at 13:32 -0400, Garrett Wollman wrote:
> > I'm not sure how many months it will take for these to show up on ftp5
> > at the current rate of updates.  Presently it takes about two and a
> > half weeks just to synchronize all the packages, after which cvsup
> > hits some sort of timeout and starts all over again.

Did you try to use -Pa option for cvsup? It helped me very much, when
I tried to compare speeds of cvsup with and without this option in the
past. Speed increased from 50 KB/s to 500 KB/s. I still use this option
today and the speed of updates on european ftp-master.eu.FreeBSD.org
is sufficient. The mirror is currently synchronized and last bigger
update including files FreeBSD-8.1-RC2-amd64-dvd1.iso.gz and
FreeBSD-8.1-RC2-i386-dvd1.iso.gz ran under 3 hours.

> > (This may be a result of switching to ZFS -- it seems that ZFS is
> > about one tenth the speed of UFS2 on the same hardware -- but I
> > haven't had time to investigate any more deeply than that.  Any ZFS
> > experts out there who could suggest a fruitful line of research?)

I'm not ZFS expert either, but I have similar experiences and I rather
stayed with UFS2. I think that long fsck is not such a big problem for
our mirrors and I can see on my 8 x 500 GB HW RAID-5 sequential reads
up to 300 MB/s using UFS2, instead of just 30 MB/s using ZFS (tested
both over RAID-5 and JBOD). Raidtest showed me similar results too.
My understading of ZFS is that it it great FS, when I have many disk
subsystems, and I need to build one to many flexible filesystems over
them.

> As a heads-up switching over to rsync generally is in the works.

Great, thanks ;o) I'm the first hungry customer with
ftp-master.eu.FreeBSD.org ;o)

> The motivation is being able to have files larger than 2Gb.
> Pieces of cvsup keep track of file sizes as a signed integer
> so max file size is 2^31...

The other problems are limited capabilities using IPv6 and I really
do not believe in identity of source and destination trees mirrored
using cvsup...

Regards.

-- 
Rudolf Cejka <cejkar at fit.vutbr.cz> http://www.fit.vutbr.cz/~cejkar
Brno University of Technology, Faculty of Information Technology
Bozetechova 2, 612 66  Brno, Czech Republic