When will ZFS become stable?

Maciej Suszko maciej at suszko.eu
Sun Jan 6 06:13:18 PST 2008


Kris Kennaway wrote:
> Ivan Voras wrote:
> > On 06/01/2008, Peter Schuller <peter.schuller at infidyne.com> wrote:
> >>> This number is not so large. It seems to be easily crashed by
> >>> rsync, for example (speaking from my own experience, and also
> >>> some of my colleagues).
> >> I can definitely say this is not *generally* true, as I do a lot of
> >> rsyncing/rdiff-backup:ing and similar stuff (with many files /
> >> large files) on ZFS without any stability issues. Problems for me
> >> have been limited to 32bit and the memory exhaustion issue rather
> >> than "hard" issues.
> > 
> > It's not generally true since kmem problems with rsync are often
> > hard to repeat - I have them on one machine, but not on another,
> > similar machine. This nonrepeatability is also a part of the
> > problem.
> > 
> >> But perhaps that's all you are referring to.
> > 
> > Mostly. I did have a ZFS crash with rsync that wasn't kmem related,
> > but only once.
> 
> kmem problems are just tuning.  They are not indicative of stability 
> problems in ZFS.  Please report any further non-kmem panics you
> experience.

I agree that ZFS is pretty stable itself. I use 32bit machine with
2gigs od RAM and all hang cases are kmem related, but the fact is that
I haven't found any way of tuning to stop it crashing. When I do some
rsyncing, especially beetwen different pools - it hangs or reboots -
mostly on bigger files (i.e. rsyncing ports tree with distfiles).
At the moment I patched the kernel with vm_kern.c.2.patch and it just
stopped crashing, but from time to time the machine looks like beeing
freezed for a second or two, after that it works normally.
Have you got any similar experience?
-- 
regards, Maciej Suszko.


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