Issues using unionfs and vnode backed disks

Jacques Marnweck jacques at powertrip.co.za
Sun May 2 16:13:54 PDT 2004


Hi,

I'm experiencing some weird issues using unionfs with vnode file backed
disks under FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE-p5 on a Intel Celeron 2.4GHz box with
512Mb RAM.  I have similar setups using FreeBSD 4.9-STABLE boxes which
are in production using vnconfig etc.

# df -H
Filesystem                 Size   Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/ad0s1a                6.2G    57M   5.7G     1%    /
devfs                      1.0K   1.0K     0B   100%    /dev
/dev/ad0s1g                 52G   8.1G    39G    17%    /home
/dev/ad0s1f               1037M   934M    20M    98%    /tmp
/dev/ad0s1d                8.3G   2.1G   5.6G    27%    /usr
/dev/ad0s1e                8.3G    45M   7.6G     1%    /var
/dev/md0c                  2.0G   142M   1.7G     8%    /home/jails/base
/dev/md1c                  5.1G   173M   4.5G     4%    /home/jails/zzzz.co.za
devfs                      1.0K   1.0K     0B   100%    /home/jails/zzzz.co.za/dev
<below>:/home/jails/base   7.1G   2.2G   4.5G    33%    /home/jails/zzzz.co.za

Basically how I do jail()'ed virtual machines is that I first create a
base disk image say base.vn which all the jails get so I only have to maintain
one base installation which can be shared amongst multiple jails.

Another bug I noticed which had similar side effects was where I had /usr/ports
mounted below /home/jails/base/usr/ports and from the jail()'ed virtual
machine I typed 'make install clean' to install a port, the box had a
deadlock.

>From reading various posts here, I'm assuming that unionfs under FreeBSD
5.2.1-RELEASE-p5 should have less issues, and should not cause the
problems I'm experiencing?

Also I've tested this a couple of times today.  Who is maintaining the
unionfs code, as I would like to chat to him/her.

Regards
--jm


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