Is ZFS ready for prime time?
Ivan Voras
ivoras at freebsd.org
Wed Nov 17 00:10:31 UTC 2010
On 11/16/10 20:23, Adam Vande More wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 8:11 AM, Ivan Voras<ivoras at freebsd.org> wrote:
>
>> Actually, I don't see anything incorrect in the above archive post.
>>
>
> I do. Cherry picking ZFS deficiencies without addressing the proper
> documented way to work around them or at even acknowledging it's possible to
> do so is FUD. It's not like traditional RAID doesn't have it's own set of
> gotcha's and proper usage environment.
Well, you are also doing cherry picking of *good* features so I'd say
there's no conceptual difference here :)
NHF, I'm not attacking you; as with everything else, people need to test
technologies they are going to use and decide if they are good enough.
> Dismissing the value of checksumming your data seems foolhardy to say the
> least. The place where silent data corruption most frequently occurs, in
> large archive type filesystems, also happens to be one of the prime usage
> candidates of RAIDZ.
Now if only the default checksum wasn't so weak:
http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=69655&tstart=30
http://bugs.opensolaris.org/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6740597
There are no details about its "fixed" status so I think the problem is
still there.
(of course, stronger options are available, etc. - and it's better than
nothing)
>> As for specific problems with ZFS, I'm also pessimistic right now - it's
>> enough to read the freebsd-fs @ freebsd.org and zfs-discuss @
>> opensolaris.org lists to see that there are frequent problems and
>> outstanding issues. You can almost grep for people losing data on ZFS
>> weekly. Compare this to the volume of complaints about UFS in both OSes
>> (almost none).
>>
>
> There are actually very few stories of ZFS/zpool loss on the FreeBSD
> list(some are misidentifications of issues like this:
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-fs/2010-September/009417.html),
> another source I would point you to is http://forums.freebsd.org/. The
> single recent valid one I can find involves a pool on geli, but I will grant
> you that it happens at all is quite disconcerting.
Yes, especially since GELI is very sensitive to corruption.
But I'm also counting cases like the inability to replace a drive which
failed, log device corruptions and similar things which will, if not
result in a totally broken file system, result in a file system which is
wedged in a way that requires it to be re-created.
In many of those, though, it's not clear if the error is in ZFS or FreeBSD.
> UFS has it's own set of
> issues/limitations so regardless of what you pick make sure you're aware of
> them and take issues to address them before problems occur.
Of course, UFS *is* old and "classical" in its implementation - it would
be just as wrong to expect fancy features from UFS like to expect such
time-tested stability from ZFS.
And new technologies need time to settle down: there are still
occasional reports of SUJ problems.
Personally, I have encountered only stability issues and currently have
only one server with ZFS in production (reduction from several of them
about a year ago), but I'm constantly testing it in staging. If the v28
import doesn't destabilize it in 9, I'm going to give it another chance.
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