Disenchanted with ZFS; alternatives?

[Ivan Voras]

Kirk Strauser wrote:

> At this point, I'm almost ready to go back to good ol' UFS2, but I'd hate to 
> give up that easy addition of new filesystems.  I *could* have a single 700GB 
> root FS but that just doesn't seem right.  Are there any good, tested GEOM-
> based ways of getting that functionality, perhaps along the lines of using 
> something like gvirstor and growfs as needed?

There's nothing as convenient as ZFS (really... anywhere) :( .

I'm still hoping someone will sponsor development or porting of a widely
used journalling file system like XFS, JFS, even ext3/4 to FreeBSD, but
in the meantime UFS2+SU isn't that bad. Practically the only way to
break it is if you have hardware errors that end up corrupting file
system data. The need to run full fsck occasionally (as opposed to the
softupdates-assisted one) is annoying but 700 GB should be manageable
with 3-4 GB of memory. The softupdates-assisted fsck actually works very
well in all but the heaviest loads (i.e. when the server is swamped by
requests immediately after booting).

You could also try gjournal but benchmark and test it first for your
workload.

gvirstor is a theoretically good option if you need its specific
functionality, only be doubly sure to benchmark it for your specific
workload as it has some /unusual/ performance characteristics.

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 258 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/attachments/20081201/cbba5e64/signature.pgp