Need a filesystem with "unlimited" inodes

Geoff Fritz gfritz at gmail.com
Thu Jun 11 15:54:35 UTC 2009


On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 10:17:02PM -0700, Michael David Crawford wrote:
> Frank Bonnet wrote:
> > It seems ZFS would match his needs , why don't use it ?
> 
> Does ZFS really work on FreeBSD?  It seems like every day someone is 
> posting about ZFS either getting corrupted or panicking their kernel.

It mostly seems to depend on the platform.

I've got an aging Athlon 64 3200+ with 4GB of memory.  I've been using ZFS
in some capacity since the early 7.0 RC days.  When I'd run FreeBSD/i386
there wasn't much I could do to prevent panics.  I did all the recommended
tuning mentioned on the FreeBSD wiki and I searched these lists and never
could get a stable configuration.  However, under amd64 I've never had a
panic with ZFS.

I was testing some pretty weird stuff, too, and ZFS was rock solid for me.
I was running ZFS over geli, often with compression, taking snapshots every
minute for an experimental script.  Normal usage or stress-testing load, it
never failed me.  I'd even run ZFS with file-backed devices on top of ZFS
or gjournal (both on top of geli), and no stability problems (though I
wouldn't recommend such a setup for a production server).

I know my account is purely anecdotal, but I've been a unix admin for a
long time and I would trust ZFS with my personal data as well as with any
any client's data if ZFS met requirements that couldn't be met with UFS2.
I don't use ZFS on my workstation because I simply don't need the features
and it's slower than UFS.  For now, gjournal does an adequate job.

-- Geoff

P.S. -- I periodically check back at prgmr.com in hopes of seeing official
FreeBSD guest support.  I love your pricing, but I tend to avoid Linux if I
can.  Any thoughts on this?


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