Defaults in 10.0 ZFS through bsdinstall

[Mark Felder]

On Nov 14, 2013, at 15:04, Teske, Devin <Devin.Teske at fisglobal.com> wrote:

> On Nov 14, 2013, at 12:59 PM, Steven Hartland wrote:
> 
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark Felder" <feld at FreeBSD.org>
>> To: <freebsd-fs at freebsd.org>
>> Sent: Thursday, November 14, 2013 8:49 PM
>> Subject: Re: Defaults in 10.0 ZFS through bsdinstall
>> 
>> 
>>> On Thu, Nov 14, 2013, at 12:35, Teske, Devin wrote:
>>>> I have never heard a good argument for having atime on. The performance
>>>> penalty on ZFS is quite large, and it also makes your snapshots grow
>>>> constant. If you have a use for it, you can turn it on I guess. This
>>>> would be solved by having the dataset editor we're planning for 10.1
>>> POLA and POSIX, even though it was a bad decision to invent atime :-)
>>> We've never turned atime off before and it would be a huge surprise to
>>> me, so I'd avocate that we let the admins who know what they're doing
>>> turn it off. I know many Linux distros install with noatime and/or
>>> nodiratime, but I'm 99% sure tools don't create filesystems with atime
>>> flagged to be off by default (tune2fs -O noatime). We don't even do installs on UFS with atime disabled by default in fstab
>>> so why should we so suddenly change course for ZFS?
>> 
>> While I can see the reason some would argue to keep it on by default
>> I personally think this is a good change.
>> 
>> Why punish everyone forever due to poor design decision made in the distant
>> past, just because a few select applications make use of said feature?
>> 
>> Is not a change which benefits the masses but comes with a slight
>> inconvenience of the select few, where they need to enable a feature
>> no one else needs a good idea?
>> 
>> Sure it needs to be clearly messaged so its not a surprise, but if thats
>> done I'm all for it.
>> 
> 
> Sounds like a vote for enabling it where-needed by-default (e.g., /var as a whole
> or more selectively, /var/mail)

I'd be OK with FreeBSD taking a stance and moving to noatime by default but we should be consistent across all filesystems that a user can install the OS on from our provided installation media. We should make it obvious to the end users as well.

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