Filesystems in 7.0 & reliability

[Norberto Meijome]

On Wed, 07 Nov 2007 20:24:06 +0000
Christian Walther <cptsalek at gmail.com> wrote:

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> 
> Hello Noberto,
> 
> Norberto Meijome wrote:
> > Hi everyone,
> > I've been using 7 for a couple of weeks now on my work laptop (kickstarted by cooling issues while in 6.2, which seem to have largely gone in 7).
> > 
> > I have a 100GB SATA drive in a Thinkpad Z60m with
> > 
> > CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 2.00GHz (1995.02-MHz 686-class CPU)
> >   Origin = "GenuineIntel"  Id = 0x6d8  Stepping = 8
> >   Features=0xafe9fbff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,CLFLUSH,DTS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,TM,PBE>
> >   Features2=0x180<EST,TM2>
> > real memory  = 1609433088 (1534 MB)
> > avail memory = 1567780864 (1495 MB)
> > 
> > I installed 7 on a normal UFS disk, but then migrated to having /usr in a UFS journaled partition , with a 1.5 GB journal on ad0s1h .  I didn't have any issue that I could directly relate to it. I had more hangs than now (i reverted back to plain UFS due to too many lock ups). The lock ups didnt leave any message or error anywhere - it seemed as if the disk subsystem stopped accepting commands (or was waiting on something ...) - anything in memory would work just fine, but as soon as disk access was needed, it 'd stall.
> > 
> 
> Did you check your harddrive? There are tools available in ports (sorry,
> I forgotten how they are called) that can access the drives internal
> fault statistics.
> Maybe your drive has an error and locks up all of a sudden. Since a
> journal leads to more disk activity it would be normal for a hardware
> related error to happen more early.

good point... but i dont think the journal would use it THAT much more that would trigger these kinds of errors about 6 times a day...and now i've been running without gjournal for 2 days without 1 crash. 

Other factors : the journal is on a part of the disk i haven't used much till now ( i split ad0s1g into 2, use g for crash dumps and h for journal). But I also run smartd and it reports no issues at all.

But, as I said before, I am comparing different kinds of fruits - since i stopped using gjournal I also have updated, rebuilt and strimlined my kernel + world. I will go back to gjournal later, but at the moment i'm snowed under.

Which is why I wanted to know what experiences, overall, had others had with gjournal.

> 
> I might be pretty wrong here, but the T60 has an internal movement
> sensor that needs some software to turn of the hard drive. Maybe your
> laptop has a sensor too, but the logic behind it is implemented in
> hardware?

yes, mine does too. But i'm mostly static when using the laptop.

> 
> > Something else i also noticed is that, after every crash, I couldn't just reboot and use my computer just fine, as I would have expected - maybe I'm wrong here.
> > I had to go into single user mode, and run a fsck /dev/ad0s1f.journal . this takes about 4 minutes. Hardly any errors were ever found  (as opposed to my non-journal partitions, which had files de-referenced ,etc.) So I suppose, in that regards, gjournal worked great.... but is the fsck needed??
> > 
> > I am also very interested in what zfs has to offer. How reliable is it? I am looking into using it both on my laptop, and as a filesystem for some large storage , possibly.
> 
> You might want to search the list archives (especially freebsd-current)
> to get some details on ZFS and possible problems regarding it. There
> seems to be an issue with ZFS and Samba and/or NFS.
> A nice summary is in the archives:
> 
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2007-August/076411.html
> 
> I don't know what the current status is, thou. And I never suffered from
> this error. In fact I'm using a raidz with 4x400GB HDDs. One use is as a
> storage for satellite video streams, so there are pretty big files
> written to it using NFS.
> One thing I really like about ZFS is that it gets rid of the old
> partition/slice paradigm. You'll never be angry with yourself again
> because you selected the wrong size for your partition/slices.
> 

Any issues with ZFS on a single HD ? any point doing that? 

thanks for the info :)
B

_________________________
{Beto|Norberto|Numard} Meijome

"Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war -- for killing people.
 We received ours for entertaining other people. I'd say we deserve ours more."
  John Lennon

I speak for myself, not my employer. Contents may be hot. Slippery when wet. Reading disclaimers makes you go blind. Writing them is worse. You have been Warned.