How to report bugs (Re: VERY frustrated with FreeBSD/UFS stability - please help or comment...)

[Gore Jarold]

--- Kris Kennaway <kris at obsecurity.org> wrote:

> On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 12:16:33PM -0700, Gore
> Jarold wrote:
> 
> > > > a) am I really the only person in the world
> that
> > > moves
> > > > around millions of inodes throughout the day ?
>  Am
> > > I
> > > > the only person in the world that has ever
> filled
> > > up a
> > > > snapshotted FS (or a quota'd FS, for that
> matter)
> > > ? 


(snip)


> You are certainly not the only persion who operates
> on millions of
> inodes, but it is disingenuous to suggest that this
> is either a
> "mainstream" or "simple" workload.  Also, I
> personally know of several
> people who do this without apparent problem, so that
> is further
> evidence that whatever problems you are seeing are
> something specific
> to your workload or configuration, or you are just
> unlucky.


Ok.  In my defense, I have to say that as a
non-developer, end user, it's hard to watch people
installing ZFS on FreeBSD and running with journaling
and newfs'ing raw disk with 7.0-current, etc., and not
feel like I am an extremely pedestrian use case.

I had no idea I was so cutting edge :)



> The larger issue here is that apparently you have
> been suffering in
> silence for many years with your various
> frustrations and they have
> finally exploded into this email.  This is really a
> poor way to
> approach the goal of getting your problems solved:
> it is fundamentally
> a failure of your expectations to think that without
> adequately
> reporting your bugs that they will somehow get
> fixed.


I need to clarify and respond to this ... my point was
that every release since 5.0 has had some new and
interesting instability in this regard.  Every time a
new release comes out, it seems to be "fixed", only to
reveal some other new and interesting instability.

So, no, I have not silently suffered with _any one_
particular problem - they never seem to last more than
one release or two.  It is only now, however, that I
have come to realize that I am in the same spot
(overall) today as I was in early 2004.  The details
are slightly different, but the end result is that my
rsyncs and cps and rms are too much for FreeBSD, and
have been for 3 years now.

So what I am saying is, individual causes of
instability (seem to) come and go, but I am not any
better of today than I was with 5.0.  I have just
realized this, and that is why I make my frustration
known today.


> Without these two things there is really very little
> that a developer
> can do to try and guess what might possibly be
> happening on your
> system.  However, it appears that we might now be
> making some
> progress:
> 
> > ssh user at host rm -rf backup.2
> > ssh user at host mv backup.1 backup.2
> > ssh user at host cp -al backup.0 backup.1
> > rsync /files user at host:/backup.0
> > 
> > The /files in question range from .2 to 2.2
> million
> > files, all told. This means that when this script
> > runs, it first either deletes OR unlinks up to 2
> > million items.  Then it does a (presumably) zero
> cost
> > move operation.  Then it does a hard-link-creating
> cp
> > of the same (up to 2 million) items.
> 
> Please provide additional details of how the
> filesystems in question
> are configured, your kernel configuration, hardware
> configuration, and
> the debugging data referred to in 2) above.


I will collect all of this and submit it the next time
the system crashes...


       
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