On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 11:30:01PM -0400, Zaphod Beeblebrox wrote: > On Sat, Sep 27, 2008 at 3:37 AM, Derek Kuli?ski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > > ZFS is the first filesystem, to my knowledge, which provides 1) a > > > reliable filesystem, 2) detection of filesystem problems in real-time or > > > during scrubbing, 3) repair of problems in real-time (assuming raidz1 or > > > raidz2 are used), and 4) does not need fsck. This makes ZFS powerful. > > > > While I am very enthusiastic about ZFS (and use it for certain tasks), there > are several things preventing me from recommending it as a general-purpose > filesystem (and none of them are specific to FreeBSD's port of it). > > As a large NAS filestore, ZFS seems very well designed. That is, if the > goal is to store a very large amount of files with data integrity and serve > them up over the network, ZFS achieves it with aplomb. > > However, as a core general purpose filesystem, it seems to have flaws, not > the least of which is a re-separation of file cache and memory cache. This > virtually doesn't matter for a fileserver, but is generally important in a > general purpose local filesystem. ZFS also has a transactional nature --- > which probably, again, works well in a fileserver, but I find (as a local > filesystem) it introduces unpredicable delays as the buffer fills up and > then gets flushed en masse.
I'm curious to know how Solaris deals with these problems, since the default filesystem (AFAIK) in OpenSolaris is now ZFS. CC'ing pjd@ who might have some insight there. > This is not to say that general purpose filesystems couldn't head in the ZFS > direction, or that ZFS is anthing but an amazing piece of technology, but > UFS and UFS+SU have not outlived their usefulness yet. > > Maybe support for odd block sizes in UFS would allow geom to manufacture > checksums (by subtracting their size from the source block). This would be > the last link in the chain to provide gjournal + gmirror + gchecksum > (addressing points 1, 2, 3 and 4). Equally, maybe gchecksum could work like > gjournal. Dunno --- that would probably be expensive in io ops. -- | Jeremy Chadwick jdc at parodius.com | | Parodius Networking http://www.parodius.com/ | | UNIX Systems Administrator Mountain View, CA, USA | | Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP: 4BD6C0CB | _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
