Asus Sabertooth Z77 and FreeBSD?
Hello list Does anyone here have any experience with the Asus Sabertooth Z77 motherboard? How well does it work with FreeBSD and is all the hardware supported (including both SATA controllers)? Thanks! - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
using freebsd-update to update jails and their host
I have a 8.0 host system with a few jails (using ezjail) that I am gearing to update to 8.2. I have used freebsd-update a few times in the past to upgrade a system between releases, but how I would I go about using it to also upgrade a few jails made using ezjail? I would obviously need to point freebsd-update to use /basejail as root which I assume isn't too hard, but what about having it merge the new/changed /etc files in individual jails? I've also discovered the ezjail-admin install -h file:// option which installs a basejail using the host system as base, am I right in thinking I could also use this by first upgrading my host and then running this command to write the /basejail over with the updated files from the host to bring them into sync? I still don't know how I would then fix the /etc under each individual jail though. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
How long do you go without upgrading FreeBSD to a newer release?
Hello folks Just a thought/question that has recently come to my mind: How long do you usually wait until upgrading to a newer release of FreeBSD? I am sure there are lots of people who upgrade straight away, but what about the opposite? What's your oldest currently running installation, do you have any issues and are you planning on an upgrade or do you intend to leave it running as is until some critical piece of hardware breaks down, requiring a replacement? The reason I am asking is: I have a 8.0 installation that I am VERY happy with. It runs like clockwork. eveything is properly configured and highly locked down, all services accessible to the outside world are running inside ezjail-managed jails on top of ZFS, meaning it's also very trivial to restore jails via snapshots, should the need ever arise. I don't really see myself NEEDING to upgrade for many years. even long after security updates stop being made for 8.0, since I can see myself being able to at least work my way around arising security issues with my configuration and to break into the real host OS and cause real damage would mean you have to be either really really dedicated, have a gun and know where I live or serve me with a warrant. Do you liva by the If it's not broken, don't fix it mantra or do you religiously keep your OS installations up to date? - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
RE: ZFS scheduling
Hi, I noticed that my system gets very slow when I'm doing some simple but intense ZFS operations. For example, I move about 20 Gigabytes of data from one data set to another on the same pool, which is a RAIDZ of 3 500 GB SATA disks. The operations itself runs fast, but meanwhile other things get really slow. E.g. opening a application takes 5 times as long as before. Also simple operations like 'ls' stall for some seconds which they did never before. It already changed a lot when I switched from RAIDZ to a mirror with only 2 disks. Memory and CPU don't seem to be the issue, I have a quad-core CPU and 8 GB RAM. I can't get rid of the idea that this has something to do with scheduling. The system is absolutely stable and fast. Somehow small I/O operations on ZFS seem to have it very difficult to make it through when other bigger ones are running. Maybe this has something to do with tuning? I know my system information is very incomplete, and there could be a lot of causes. But anybody knows if this could be an issue with ZFS itself? Hello As you do mention, your system information is indeed very incomplete, making your problem rather hard to diagnose :) Scheduling, in the traditional sense, is unlikely to be the cause of your problems, but here's a few things you could look into: First one is obviously the pool layout, heavy-duty writing on a pool, consisting of a single raidz vdev is slow (slower than writing to a mirror, as you already discovered), period. such is the nature of raidz. Additionally, your problem is magnified by the fact that your have reads competing with writes since you are reading (I assume) from the same pool. One approach to alleviating the problem would be to utilize a pool consisting of 2 or more raidz vdevs in a stripe, like this: pool raidz disc1 disc2 disc3 raidz disc4 disc5 disc6 The second potential cause of your issues is the system wrongly guesstimating your optimal TXG commit size. ZFS works in such a fashion, that it commits data to disk in chunks. How big chunks it writes at a time it tries to optimize by evaluating your pool IO bandwidth over time and available RAM. The TXG commits happen with an interval of 5-30 seconds. The worst case scenario is such, that if the system misguesses the optimal TXG size, then under heavy write load, it continues to defer the commit for up to the 30 second timeout and when it hits the caps, it frantically commits it ALL at once. This can and most likely will completely starve your read IO on the pool for as long as the drives choke while committing the TXG. If you are on 8.0-RELEASE, you could try playing with the vfs.zfs.txg.timeout= variable in /boot/loader.conf, generally sane values are 5-30, with 30 being the default. You could also try adjusting vfs.zfs.vdev.max_pending= down from the default of 35 to a lower value and see if that helps. AFAIK, 8-STABLE and -HEAD have a systctl variable which directly allow you to manually set the preferred TXG size and I've pretty sure I've seen some patches on the mailing lists to add this functionality to 8.0. Hope this helps. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: version/revision control software for things mostly not source
On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 4:10 AM, Gene f...@brightstar.bomgardner.net wrote: On Sat, 17 Apr 2010 18:08:49 +0300, Dan Naumov wrote I think I am reaching the point where I want to have some kind of sane and easy to use version/revision control software for my various personal files and small projects. We are talking about varied kind of data, ranging from binary format game data (I have been doing FPS level design as a hobby for over a decade) to .doc office documents to ASCI text formatted game data. Most of the data is not plaintext. So far I have been using a hacked together mix of things, mostly a combination of essentially storing each revision of any given file a separate file001, file002, file003, etc which while easy to use and understand, seems rather space-inefficient and a little bit of ZFS snapshotting, however I want something better. Sadly, FreeBSD's ZFS doesn't have dedup or this functionality would've been easy to implement with my current hacked together methods. Performance does't matter all that much (unless we are talking something silly like a really crazy IO bottleneck), since the only expected user is just me and perhaps a few friends. Thanks! - Sincerely, Dan Naumov Someone else mentioned Subversion and Tortoisesvn. I use these tools for revision management of 600 or so powerpoints, graphics, and other miscellaneous files that we use for church services. Once up and running, it's simplicity itself. I also use websvn to allow read only access to individual files via a browser. I've found it works like a charm. --- IHN, Gene I've looked at SVN and it looks reasonably easy to grok, but reading the Version Control with Subversion book... it seems there is no actual way to truly erase/delete/destoy/purge a part of an existing repository? This sounds rather weird and annoying. What if I decide that project XYZ is beyond redemption and abandon it, I delete the working copy of it, but all history is still in there, gigabytes upon gigabytes of data. With no way to remove it, it sounds like a really big limitation. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
version/revision control software for things mostly not source
I think I am reaching the point where I want to have some kind of sane and easy to use version/revision control software for my various personal files and small projects. We are talking about varied kind of data, ranging from binary format game data (I have been doing FPS level design as a hobby for over a decade) to .doc office documents to ASCI text formatted game data. Most of the data is not plaintext. So far I have been using a hacked together mix of things, mostly a combination of essentially storing each revision of any given file a separate file001, file002, file003, etc which while easy to use and understand, seems rather space-inefficient and a little bit of ZFS snapshotting, however I want something better. What would be examples of good version control software for me? The major things I want are: a simple and easy to use Windows GUI client for my workstation, so I can quickly browse through different projects, go back to any given point in time and view/checkout the data of that point to a Windows machine. Space efficiency, while not critical (the server has 2 x 2TB drives in RAID1 and can easily be expanded down the line should the need eventually arise) is obviously an important thing to have, surely even with binary data some space can be saved if you have 20 versions of the same file with minor changes. Sadly, FreeBSD's ZFS doesn't have dedup or this functionality would've been easy to implement with my current hacked together methods. Performance does't matter all that much (unless we are talking something silly like a really crazy IO bottleneck), since the only expected user is just me and perhaps a few friends. Thanks! - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
RE: boot loader too large
Hey A 64kb freebsd-boot partition should be more than plenty for what you want to do, see my setup at: http://freebsd.pastebin.com/QS6MnNKc If you want to setup a ZFS boot/root configuration and make your life easier, just use the installation script provided by the guy who wrote ManageBE: http://anonsvn.h3q.com/projects/freebsd-patches/browser/manageBE/create-zfsboot-gpt_livecd.sh - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Nethogs or similar for FreeBSD?
Is there something like Nethogs for FreeBSD that would show bandwidth use broken down by PID, user and such in a convinient easy to view and understand fashion? http://nethogs.sourceforge.net/nethogs.png - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Nethogs or similar for FreeBSD?
On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 10:44 PM, mikel king mikel.k...@olivent.com wrote: On Apr 10, 2010, at 3:14 PM, Dan Naumov wrote: Is there something like Nethogs for FreeBSD that would show bandwidth use broken down by PID, user and such in a convinient easy to view and understand fashion? http://nethogs.sourceforge.net/nethogs.png - Sincerely, Dan Naumov Looks interesting, and pretty light weight only requiring ncurses and libpcap. I wonder how hard it'd be to compile it and get it running. What version of FreeBSD are you running? Cheers, Mikel King I am on 8.0/amd64. From the website of Nethogs: Since NetHogs heavily relies on /proc, it currently runs on Linux only. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
bandwidth throttling?
Hello folks I have a 8.0 system that has 2 IPs: ifconfig em1 em1: flags=8843UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST metric 0 mtu 1500 options=19bRXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM,TSO4 ether 00:25:90:01:32:93 inet 192.168.1.126 netmask 0xff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255 inet 192.168.1.127 netmask 0xff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255 media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT full-duplex) status: active The .126 is used by the host for various obvious things and I have a jail on the same machine running off the .127 IP. Is there a quick and easy way to have the jail host throttle bandwidth usage of everything going to and out of the .127 jail? I don't really need anything fancy, I just want to set hard limits for the entire jail globally, like don't use more than 500KB/s downstream and more than 150KB/s upstream. What would be the best way around doing this? My understanding is that to do this with PF, I would need ALTQ meaning I have to use a custom kernel and that IPFW with dummynet should have similar functionality but should also work with GENERIC? Thanks! - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: bizarre mount_nullfs issue with jails / ezjail
An additional question: how come sade and sysinstall which are run inside the jail can see (and I can only assume they can also operate on and damage) the real underlying disks of the host? Disks (as well as others you have in your host's /dev) aren't visible inside jails. Well, somehow they are on my system. I guess I should've also clarified that the jail was installed using ezjail and not completely manually From /usr/local/etc/ezjail/semipublic export jail_semipublic_devfs_enable=YES export jail_semipublic_devfs_ruleset=devfsrules_jail - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: bizarre mount_nullfs issue with jails / ezjail
On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 10:10 AM, Aiza aiz...@comclark.com wrote: Dan Naumov wrote: An additional question: how come sade and sysinstall which are run inside the jail can see (and I can only assume they can also operate on and damage) the real underlying disks of the host? Disks (as well as others you have in your host's /dev) aren't visible inside jails. Well, somehow they are on my system. I guess I should've also clarified that the jail was installed using ezjail and not completely manually From /usr/local/etc/ezjail/semipublic export jail_semipublic_devfs_enable=YES export jail_semipublic_devfs_ruleset=devfsrules_jail - Sincerely, Dan Naumov You are not in a jail but as the host. Use ezjail-admin console jailname and things will look alot different. What you are playing with are ezjails system control files. No, I am not, I am running sade / sysinstall INSIDE THE JAIL (AFTER ezjail-admin console jailname or after connecting to the jail via ssh). - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
RE: Preventing Bad SMB Mount From Stalling A Boot
I mount my SMB shares from /etc/fstab on a FBSD 8.x production machine like this: //USER at WINSERVER/SHARE /mountpointsmbfs rw 0 0 The problem is that after an outage, WINSERVER doesn't come up before the FBSD machine. So, the FBSD machine tries to boot and then hangs permanently because it cannot get the SMB share points mounted. This recently happened after a catastrophic power outage that cooked the share info on WINSERVER. Even after it came up, it was no longer serving the proper shares and the FBSD machine could never find the SMB shares and thus hung permanently. The SMB mounts are not essential for systems operations. Is there a way to tell the FBSD to try and mount SMB, but keep going and complete the boot if it cannot? A bit of an ugly hack, but have you considered attempting to mount the share via an automatic script after the system has finished booting? - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
bizarre mount_nullfs issue with jails / ezjail
So, I want the basejail to only contain the world and link the ports tree from the host into each individual jail when it's time to update the ports inside them, but I am running into a bit of a bizarre issue: I can mount_nullfs /usr/ports elsewhere on the host just fine, but it doesn't work if I try to mount_nullfs it to /usr/ports inside the jail: mount_nullfs /usr/ports/ /usr/ports2 df -H | grep ports cerberus/usr-ports34G241M 34G 1%/usr/ports cerberus/usr-ports-distfiles 34G 0B 34G 0% /usr/ports/distfiles cerberus/usr-ports-packages 34G 0B 34G 0% /usr/ports/packages /usr/ports34G241M 34G 1%/usr/ports2 mount | grep ports cerberus/usr-ports on /usr/ports (zfs, local) cerberus/usr-ports-distfiles on /usr/ports/distfiles (zfs, local) cerberus/usr-ports-packages on /usr/ports/packages (zfs, local) /usr/ports on /usr/ports2 (nullfs, local) mount_nullfs /usr/ports/ /usr/jails/semipublic/usr/ports mount_nullfs: /basejail: No such file or directory What is going on here? I also note that the error actually wants a /basejail on the host, which is even more bizarre: mount_nullfs /usr/ports/ /usr/jails/semipublic/usr/ports mount_nullfs: /basejail: No such file or directory mkdir /basejail mount_nullfs /usr/ports/ /usr/jails/semipublic/usr/ports mount_nullfs: /basejail/usr: No such file or directory Yet, this works: mkdir /usr/jails/semipublic/test mount_nullfs /usr/ports/ /usr/jails/semipublic/test umount /usr/jails/semipublic/test Any ideas? - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: bizarre mount_nullfs issue with jails / ezjail
On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 12:37 AM, Glen Barber glen.j.bar...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Dan, Dan Naumov wrote: So, I want the basejail to only contain the world and link the ports tree from the host into each individual jail when it's time to update the ports inside them, but I am running into a bit of a bizarre issue: I can mount_nullfs /usr/ports elsewhere on the host just fine, but it doesn't work if I try to mount_nullfs it to /usr/ports inside the jail: mount_nullfs /usr/ports/ /usr/ports2 df -H | grep ports cerberus/usr-ports 34G 241M 34G 1% /usr/ports cerberus/usr-ports-distfiles 34G 0B 34G 0% /usr/ports/distfiles cerberus/usr-ports-packages 34G 0B 34G 0% /usr/ports/packages /usr/ports 34G 241M 34G 1% /usr/ports2 mount | grep ports cerberus/usr-ports on /usr/ports (zfs, local) cerberus/usr-ports-distfiles on /usr/ports/distfiles (zfs, local) cerberus/usr-ports-packages on /usr/ports/packages (zfs, local) /usr/ports on /usr/ports2 (nullfs, local) mount_nullfs /usr/ports/ /usr/jails/semipublic/usr/ports mount_nullfs: /basejail: No such file or directory What is going on here? I also note that the error actually wants a /basejail on the host, which is even more bizarre: mount_nullfs /usr/ports/ /usr/jails/semipublic/usr/ports mount_nullfs: /basejail: No such file or directory mkdir /basejail mount_nullfs /usr/ports/ /usr/jails/semipublic/usr/ports mount_nullfs: /basejail/usr: No such file or directory Yet, this works: mkdir /usr/jails/semipublic/test mount_nullfs /usr/ports/ /usr/jails/semipublic/test umount /usr/jails/semipublic/test Any ideas? The ports directory in an ezjail is a link to /basejail/usr/ports (in the jail). Breaking the link (from the host) allows the mount to work successfully. orion# ll usr/ports lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 19 Mar 8 18:06 usr/ports - /basejail/usr/ports orion# unlink usr/ports orion# mkdir usr/ports orion# mount_nullfs /usr/ports usr/ports orion# Regards, -- Glen Barber Thanks for the tip. An additional question: how come sade and sysinstall which are run inside the jail can see (and I can only assume they can also operate on and damage) the real underlying disks of the host? - Sincerely Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Intel D945GSE vs Zotac ION ITX (was: Support for Zotac MB with nVidia ION chipset)
On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 1:20 PM, Jeremie Le Hen jere...@le-hen.org wrote: Nonetheless I'm a little worried by what you said about the lack of ECC. Computers has been used for years before ECC came out and obviously they worked :). Do you really think it might happen to be a problem? Would an Intel board would compensate for this? Dan, have you ever experienced weird problems that could be explained by bitflips? Personally, I haven't had any issues, but then again on the ZFS scale of things, both my current pool size (2 TB) and projected pool size when I add more disks (6 TB) is pretty small. If this was a heavily used machine with a 10 TB pool or bigger, I would definately give strong consideration to ECC. For the records, I've found an interesting and very recent post about someone running OpenSolaris on this Supermicro motherboard [1]. He uses a thumbdrive for the operating system and with four drives connected onto it, the whole system sucks 41 watts when idle (27 without any HDD, which is twice as the Intel D945GSE The power draw (from the wall) for the Supermicro X7SPA-H without any disks attached is as following: 26W - During boot. 24W - IDLE at console 28W - Full load This is with a 80+ rated Corsair 400CX PSU. Sadly, I did not have the opportunity to measure the power draw with powerd enabled. The D945GSE is unsuitable for use as a ZFS NAS due to it's severe feature limitations when compared against the X7SPA-H, of biggest concern would be the limitation of RAM, followed by the amount of native SATA ports, followed by the fact that you only get a PCI-E x1 (both physical formfactor and speed-wise) slot for expansion, while most controller cards are either 4x or 8x, meaning they simply wouldn't physically fit into the slot. Singlecore 1,6Ghz Diamondville Atom VS Dualcore 1,66Ghz Pineview Atom 1 RAM socket supporting a max of 1GB VS 2 RAM sockets supporting a max of 4GB (note that X7SPA-H uses SO-DIMMs, not regular DIMMs) 2 SATA ports vs 6 SATA ports 1 Realtec NIC vs 2 x Intel NIC PCI-E x1 Slot VS PCI-E x4 Slot (in x16 form factor) for expansion - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
RE: Intel D945GSE vs Zotac ION ITX (was: Support for Zotac MB with nVidia ION chipset)
Just a small comment regarding Atom suitability for a home NAS: feel free to completely ignore people saying that ZFS overhead is too much for an Atom to handle efficiently, they have no idea what they are talking about. I am using a Supermicro X7SPA-H board (Atom D510) and I an easily achieving ~85mb/s transfers over Samba to and from the machine. 85mb/s is also the best these drives will do and my CPU is nowhere near maxed during these transfers, so with better disks I would be easily saturating gigabit, while still having plenty of available CPU time. What you want is a good disk controller and fast and reliable disks, 2gb RAM is enough, but with 4gb ram you can basically safely enable prefetch for a very noticable boost in sequential pattern reads. Below are some numbers from my personal Atom NAS system: === bonnie -s 8192 ---Sequential Output ---Sequential Input-- --Random-- -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks--- MachineMB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU /sec %CPU 8192 29065 68.9 52027 39.8 39636 33.3 54057 95.4 105335 34.6 174.1 7.9 dd if=/dev/zero of=test1 bs=1M count=8192 8589934592 bytes transferred in 111.300481 secs (77177875 bytes/sec) (73,6mb/s) dd if=/dev/urandom of=test2 bs=1M count=8192 dd if=test2 of=/dev/zero bs=1M 8589934592 bytes transferred in 76.031399 secs (112978779 bytes/sec) (107,74mb/s) === This is a ZFS mirror of 2 x 2tb WD Green drives with 32mb cache with the automatic headparking disabled via WDIDLE3. The drives are very cheap and hence, are the bottleneck in my case. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
tuning vfs.zfs.vdev.max_pending and solving the issue of ZFS writes choking read IO
Hello I am having a slight issue (and judging by Google results, similar issues have been seen by other FreeBSD and Solaris/OpenSolaris users) with writes choking the read IO. The issue I am having is described pretty well here: http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=106453 It seems that under heavy write load, ZFS likes to aggregate a really huge amount of data before actually writing it to disks, resulting in sudden 10+ second stalls where it frantically tries to commit everything, completely choking read IO in the process and sometimes even the network (with a large enough write to a mirror pool using DD, I can cause my SSH sessions to drop dead, without actually running out of RAM. As soon as the data is committed, I can reconnect back). Beyond the issue of system interactivity (or rather, the near-disappearance thereof) during these enormous flushes, this kind of pattern seems really ineffective from the CPU utilization point of view. Instead of a relatively stable and consistent flow of reads and writes, allowing the CPU to be utilized as much as possible, when the system is committing the data the CPU basically stays IDLE for 10+ seconds (or as long as the flush takes) and the process of committing unwritten data to the pool seemingly completely trounces the priority of any read operations. Has anyone done any extensive testing of the effects of tuning vfs.zfs.vdev.max_pending on this issue? Is there some universally recommended value beyond the default 35? Anything else I should be looking at? - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
RE: 12 TB Disk In freebsd AMD 64 ?
MBR can only work with 2TB volumes, however, we are no longer limited to MBR. With GPT, we can have really really big volumes. That being said, I really don't think you should be using a single 12TB volume with UFS, even if you have underlying redundancy provided by a hardware raid device. Have you ever had to fsck a 2TB volume or bigger? It's not fun. My recommendation would be to use ZFS. Use it to manage your array and filesystems and use it on top of individual raw disk devices, if you must use your raid controller, use it in JBOD mode. If you want a relatively technical introduction to ZFS and why it's good for you, read up here: http://www.slideshare.net/relling/zfs-tutorial-usenix-june-2009 - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
sftp server with speed throttling
What are my options if I want to run an sftp server with speed throttling? My understanding is that openssh (which includes sftp) in base does not support this directly, so I would have to either use a custom kernel with ALTQ (and I would really rather stick to GENERIC so I can use freebsd-update) which sounds like a bit too much configuration work or pass sftp traffic through PF and throttle it (ugly, would also affect ssh traffic). Are there any sftp servers with directly built-in functionality for this? I just would to be able to set limits for upload speed globally for the entire server and preferably to also be able to do speed settings on a per-user basis. Thanks. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Samba read speed performance tuning
On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 3:49 AM, Gary Gatten ggat...@waddell.com wrote: It MAY make a big diff, but make sure during your tests you use unique files or flush the cache or you'll me testing cache speed and not disk speed. Yeah I did make sure to use unique files for testing the effects of prefetch. This is Atom D510 / Supermicro X75SPA-H / 4Gb Ram with 2 x slow 2tb WD Green (WD20EADS) disks with 32mb cache in a ZFS mirror after enabling prefetch.: Code: bonnie -s 8192 ---Sequential Output ---Sequential Input-- --Random-- -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks--- MachineMB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU /sec %CPU 8192 29065 68.9 52027 39.8 39636 33.3 54057 95.4 105335 34.6 174.1 7.9 DD read: dd if=/dev/urandom of=test2 bs=1M count=8192 dd if=test2 of=/dev/zero bs=1M 8589934592 bytes transferred in 76.031399 secs (112978779 bytes/sec) (107,74mb/s) Individual disks read capability: 75mb/s Reading off a mirror of 2 disks with prefetch disabled: 60mb/s Reading off a mirror of 2 disks with prefetch enabled: 107mb/s - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Samba read speed performance tuning
On a FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE/amd64 system with a Supermicro X7SPA-H board using an Intel gigabit nic with the em driver, running on top of a ZFS mirror, I was seeing a strange issue. Local reads and writes to the pool easily saturate the disks with roughly 75mb/s throughput, which is roughly the best these drives can do. However, working with Samba, writes to a share could easily pull off 75mb/s and saturate the disks, but reads off a share were resulting in rather pathetic 18mb/s throughput. I found a threadon the FreeBSD forums (http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=9187) and followed the suggested advice. I rebuilt Samba with AIO support, kldloaded the aio module and made the following changes to my smb.conf From: socket options=TCP_NODELAY To: socket options=SO_RCVBUF=131072 SO_SNDBUF=131072 TCP_NODELAY min receivefile size=16384 use sendfile=true aio read size = 16384 aio write size = 16384 aio write behind = true dns proxy = no[/CODE] This showed a very welcome improvement in read speed, I went from 18mb/s to 48mb/s. The write speed remained unchanged and was still saturating the disks. Now I tried the suggested sysctl tunables: atombsd# sysctl net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0 net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack: 1 - 0 atombsd# sysctl net.inet.tcp.path_mtu_discovery=0 net.inet.tcp.path_mtu_discovery: 1 - 0 atombsd# sysctl net.inet.tcp.recvbuf_inc=524288 net.inet.tcp.recvbuf_inc: 16384 - 524288 atombsd# sysctl net.inet.tcp.recvbuf_max=16777216 net.inet.tcp.recvbuf_max: 262144 - 16777216 atombsd# sysctl net.inet.tcp.sendbuf_inc=524288 net.inet.tcp.sendbuf_inc: 8192 - 524288 atombsd# sysctl net.inet.tcp.sendbuf_max=16777216 net.inet.tcp.sendbuf_max: 262144 - 16777216 atombsd# sysctl net.inet.tcp.sendspace=65536 net.inet.tcp.sendspace: 32768 - 65536 atombsd# sysctl net.inet.udp.maxdgram=57344 net.inet.udp.maxdgram: 9216 - 57344 atombsd# sysctl net.inet.udp.recvspace=65536 net.inet.udp.recvspace: 42080 - 65536 atombsd# sysctl net.local.stream.recvspace=65536 net.local.stream.recvspace: 8192 - 65536 atombsd# sysctl net.local.stream.sendspace=65536 net.local.stream.sendspace: 8192 - 65536 This improved the read speeds a further tiny bit, now I went from 48mb/s to 54mb/s. This is it however, I can't figure out how to increase Samba read speed any further. Any ideas? ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Samba read speed performance tuning
On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 11:14 PM, Dan Naumov dan.nau...@gmail.com wrote: On a FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE/amd64 system with a Supermicro X7SPA-H board using an Intel gigabit nic with the em driver, running on top of a ZFS mirror, I was seeing a strange issue. Local reads and writes to the pool easily saturate the disks with roughly 75mb/s throughput, which is roughly the best these drives can do. However, working with Samba, writes to a share could easily pull off 75mb/s and saturate the disks, but reads off a share were resulting in rather pathetic 18mb/s throughput. I found a threadon the FreeBSD forums (http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=9187) and followed the suggested advice. I rebuilt Samba with AIO support, kldloaded the aio module and made the following changes to my smb.conf From: socket options=TCP_NODELAY To: socket options=SO_RCVBUF=131072 SO_SNDBUF=131072 TCP_NODELAY min receivefile size=16384 use sendfile=true aio read size = 16384 aio write size = 16384 aio write behind = true dns proxy = no[/CODE] This showed a very welcome improvement in read speed, I went from 18mb/s to 48mb/s. The write speed remained unchanged and was still saturating the disks. Now I tried the suggested sysctl tunables: atombsd# sysctl net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0 net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack: 1 - 0 atombsd# sysctl net.inet.tcp.path_mtu_discovery=0 net.inet.tcp.path_mtu_discovery: 1 - 0 atombsd# sysctl net.inet.tcp.recvbuf_inc=524288 net.inet.tcp.recvbuf_inc: 16384 - 524288 atombsd# sysctl net.inet.tcp.recvbuf_max=16777216 net.inet.tcp.recvbuf_max: 262144 - 16777216 atombsd# sysctl net.inet.tcp.sendbuf_inc=524288 net.inet.tcp.sendbuf_inc: 8192 - 524288 atombsd# sysctl net.inet.tcp.sendbuf_max=16777216 net.inet.tcp.sendbuf_max: 262144 - 16777216 atombsd# sysctl net.inet.tcp.sendspace=65536 net.inet.tcp.sendspace: 32768 - 65536 atombsd# sysctl net.inet.udp.maxdgram=57344 net.inet.udp.maxdgram: 9216 - 57344 atombsd# sysctl net.inet.udp.recvspace=65536 net.inet.udp.recvspace: 42080 - 65536 atombsd# sysctl net.local.stream.recvspace=65536 net.local.stream.recvspace: 8192 - 65536 atombsd# sysctl net.local.stream.sendspace=65536 net.local.stream.sendspace: 8192 - 65536 This improved the read speeds a further tiny bit, now I went from 48mb/s to 54mb/s. This is it however, I can't figure out how to increase Samba read speed any further. Any ideas? Oh my god... Why did noone tell me how much of an enormous performance boost vfs.zfs.prefetch_disable=0 (aka actually enabling prefetch) is. My local reads off the mirror pool jumped from 75mb/s to 96mb/s (ie. they are now nearly 25% faster than reading off an individual disk) and reads off a Samba share skyrocketed from 50mb/s to 90mb/s. By default, FreeBSD sets vfs.zfs.prefetch_disable to 1 on any i386 systems and on any amd64 systems with less than 4GB of avaiable memory. My system is amd64 with 4gb ram, but integrated video eats some of that, so the autotuning disabled the prefetch. I had read up on it and a fair amount of people seemed to have performance issues caused by having prefetch enabled and get better results with it turned off, in my case however, it seems that enabling it gave a really solid boost to performance. - Sincerely Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Some questions about vfs.zfs.prefetch_disable=1 and ZFS filesystem versions
After looking at the arc_summary.pl script (found at http://jhell.googlecode.com/files/arc_summary.pl), I have realized that my system has set vfs.zfs.prefetch_disable=1 by default, looking at dmesg, I see: = ZFS NOTICE: Prefetch is disabled by default if less than 4GB of RAM is present; to enable, add vfs.zfs.prefetch_disable=0 to /boot/loader.conf. = ...except I do have 4gb of RAM. Is this caused by integrated GPU snatching some of my memory at boot? From dmesg: = real memory = 4294967296 (4096 MB) avail memory = 4088082432 (3898 MB) = What kind of things does this tunable affect and how much of a performance impact does enabling / disabling it have? Should I manually enable it? I've also noticed a really weird inconsistency, my dmesg says the following: = ZFS filesystem version 13 ZFS storage pool version 13 = Yet: = zfs get version NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE cerberus version 3 - cerberus/DATA version 3 - cerberus/ROOT version 3 - cerberus/ROOT/cerberusversion 3 - cerberus/home version 3 - cerberus/home/atombsd version 3 - cerberus/home/frictionversion 3 - cerberus/home/jagoversion 3 - cerberus/home/karni version 3 - cerberus/tmp version 3 - cerberus/usr-localversion 3 - cerberus/usr-obj version 3 - cerberus/usr-portsversion 3 - cerberus/usr-ports-distfiles version 3 - cerberus/usr-src version 3 - cerberus/var version 3 - cerberus/var-db version 3 - cerberus/var-log version 3 - cerberus/var-tmp version 3 - = Is this normal or should zfs get version also show version 13? This is on a system with the pool and filesystems created with 8.0-RELEASE, by the way. Thanks! - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Some questions about vfs.zfs.prefetch_disable=1 and ZFS filesystem versions
Nevermind the question about ZFS filesystem versions, I should've Googled more throughly and read Pawel's responce to this question before (answer: dmesg picks the filesystem version wrong, it IS and supposed to be v3). I am still curious about prefetch though. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
powerd on 8.0, is it considered safe?
Hello Is powerd finally considered stable and safe to use on 8.0? At least on 7.2, it consistently caused panics when used on Atom systems with Hyper-Threading enabled, but I recall that Attilio Rao was looking into it. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
RE: powerd on 8.0, is it considered safe?
Okay, now I am baffled. Up until this point, I wasn't using powerd on this new Atom D510 system. I ran sysctl and noticed that dev.cpu.0.freq: is actually 1249 and doesn't change no matter what kind of load the system is under. If I boot to BIOS, under BIOS CPU is shown as 1,66 Ghz. Okayy... I guess this explains why my buildworld and buildkernel took over 5 hours if by default, it gets stuck at 1249 Mhz for no obvious reason. I enabled powerd and now according to dev.cpu.0.freq:, the system is permanently stuck at 1666 Mhz, regardless of whether the system is under load or not. atombsd# uname -a FreeBSD atombsd.localdomain 8.0-RELEASE-p2 FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE-p2 #0: Tue Jan 5 21:11:58 UTC 2010 r...@amd64-builder.daemonology.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC amd64 atombsd# kenv | grep smbios.planar.product smbios.planar.product=X7SPA-H atombsd# sysctl dev.cpu dev.est dev.cpufreq dev.p4tcc debug.cpufreq kern.timecounter dev.cpu.0.%desc: ACPI CPU dev.cpu.0.%driver: cpu dev.cpu.0.%location: handle=\_PR_.P001 dev.cpu.0.%pnpinfo: _HID=none _UID=0 dev.cpu.0.%parent: acpi0 dev.cpu.0.freq: 1666 dev.cpu.0.freq_levels: 1666/-1 1457/-1 1249/-1 1041/-1 833/-1 624/-1 416/-1 208/-1 dev.cpu.0.cx_supported: C1/0 dev.cpu.0.cx_lowest: C1 dev.cpu.0.cx_usage: 100.00% last 500us dev.cpu.1.%desc: ACPI CPU dev.cpu.1.%driver: cpu dev.cpu.1.%location: handle=\_PR_.P002 dev.cpu.1.%pnpinfo: _HID=none _UID=0 dev.cpu.1.%parent: acpi0 dev.cpu.1.cx_supported: C1/0 dev.cpu.1.cx_lowest: C1 dev.cpu.1.cx_usage: 100.00% last 500us dev.cpu.2.%desc: ACPI CPU dev.cpu.2.%driver: cpu dev.cpu.2.%location: handle=\_PR_.P003 dev.cpu.2.%pnpinfo: _HID=none _UID=0 dev.cpu.2.%parent: acpi0 dev.cpu.2.cx_supported: C1/0 dev.cpu.2.cx_lowest: C1 dev.cpu.2.cx_usage: 100.00% last 500us dev.cpu.3.%desc: ACPI CPU dev.cpu.3.%driver: cpu dev.cpu.3.%location: handle=\_PR_.P004 dev.cpu.3.%pnpinfo: _HID=none _UID=0 dev.cpu.3.%parent: acpi0 dev.cpu.3.cx_supported: C1/0 dev.cpu.3.cx_lowest: C1 dev.cpu.3.cx_usage: 100.00% last 500us sysctl: unknown oid 'dev.est' Right. So how do I investigate why does the CPU get stuck at 1249 Mhz after boot by default when not using powerd and why it gets stuck at 1666 Mhz with powerd enabled and doesn't scale back down when IDLE? Out of curiosity, I stopped powerd but the CPU remained at 1666 Mhz. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: powerd on 8.0, is it considered safe?
OK, now I feel a bit stupid. The second half of my PR at http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=144551 (anything related to powerd behaviour) can be ignored. For testing purposes, I started powerd in the foreground and observed it's behaviour. It works exactly as advertised and apparently the very act of issuing a sysctl -a | grep dev.cpu.0.freq command uses up a high % of CPU time for a fraction of a second, resulting in confusing output, I was always getting the highest cpu frequency state as the output. Testing powerd in foreground however, shows correct behaviour, CPU is downclocked both before and after issuing that command :) Still doesn't explain why the system boots up at 1249 Mhz, but that's not that big of an issue at this point now I see that powerd is behaving correctly. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
freebsd-update on a 8.0 rootzfs system
Hello folks I have a 8.0 system that uses zfsroot and gptzfsboot. It uses the GENERIC kernel and the only thing that had to be manually recompiled is obviously the bootloader, to enable zfs boot support, other then that, the system is using stock 8.0 binaries. Since fully rebuilding world and kernel on this system is a 5 hour process, I would very much like to use freebsd-update and I wanted someone to clarify the utility's behaviour. If I run freebsd-update on this system, what will it do when it detects that the bootloader binaries do not match those of stock 8.0-RELEASE? Will it: 1) Ignore the changed/recompiled bootloader files completely, only updating the binaries whose checksums it can recognize. This behaviour is alright for updating within 8.0, updating for release errata, but would cause some problems updating to 8.1 and further, since 8.1 will have zfs capable bootloader by default and having freebsd-update always completely ignore a system component that has once been recompiled sounds a bit silly. 2) Happily update the system, overwrite my custom compiled bootloader, forcing me to manually rebuild the bootloader again before I reboot the system. This I guess would actually be the desired behaviour. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: freebsd-update on a 8.0 rootzfs system
On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 1:57 PM, Dan Naumov dan.nau...@gmail.com wrote: Hello folks I have a 8.0 system that uses zfsroot and gptzfsboot. It uses the GENERIC kernel and the only thing that had to be manually recompiled is obviously the bootloader, to enable zfs boot support, other then that, the system is using stock 8.0 binaries. Since fully rebuilding world and kernel on this system is a 5 hour process, I would very much like to use freebsd-update and I wanted someone to clarify the utility's behaviour. If I run freebsd-update on this system, what will it do when it detects that the bootloader binaries do not match those of stock 8.0-RELEASE? Will it: 1) Ignore the changed/recompiled bootloader files completely, only updating the binaries whose checksums it can recognize. This behaviour is alright for updating within 8.0, updating for release errata, but would cause some problems updating to 8.1 and further, since 8.1 will have zfs capable bootloader by default and having freebsd-update always completely ignore a system component that has once been recompiled sounds a bit silly. 2) Happily update the system, overwrite my custom compiled bootloader, forcing me to manually rebuild the bootloader again before I reboot the system. This I guess would actually be the desired behaviour OK, I did a testrun of this in a VM environment and #1 is what happens. I tried freebsd-update IDS first and that showed that /boot/loader SHA256 does not match what is expected, I then applied the updates, but it ignored my custom /boot/loader anyway and didn't touch it despite the mismatch. Why? My biggest concern is what does this mean going forward, when the eventual time for upgrading to 8.1 and 8.2 comes. 8.1 definately has a changed bootloader. Does the current behaviour mean that when I upgrade to 8.1, it will still refuse to update the bootloader and will refuse to update it forever or will it actually update whatever is given to 8.1, which would be the desired behaviour? - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
RE: make make install accept defaults
Portmaster (ports-mgmt/portmaster) will help you do that. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Automated kernel crash reporting system
On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 1:19 PM, Robert Watson rwat...@freebsd.org wrote: On Thu, 4 Mar 2010, sean connolly wrote: Automatic reporting would end up being a mess given that panics can be caused by hardware problems. Having an autoreport check if memtest was run before it reports, or having it only run with -CURRENTmight be useful. I too, disagree with this. Surely most attention would be given to the most often recurring problems across varied hardware. If a new -RELEASE is tagged and suddenly there is an influx of very similar automated crash reports across a wide selection of hardware, some conclusions can be reached. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Automated kernel crash reporting system
Hello I noticed the following on the FreeBSD website: http://www.freebsd.org/projects/ideas/ideas.html#p-autoreport Has there been any progress/work done on the automated kernel crash reporting system? The current ways of enabling and gathering the information required by developers for investigating panics and similar issues are unintuitive and user-hostile to say the least and anything to automate the process would be a very welcome addition. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
locale settings and displaying file names in multiple languages
Hello I have a 8.0/amd64 system serving a few Samba shares. Windows clients write files to some of these shares using multiple languages: english, finnish and russian. When accessed from any given Windows client, the file and directory names all look correct. However when accessing these same files locally, the file- and directory names that utilize russian and finnish languages are full of question marks, like this for russian: -rw-r--r-- 1 nobody nobody11M Feb 21 2008 ?? -rw-r--r-- 1 nobody nobody 9.2M Feb 21 2008 ??-?? -rw-r--r-- 1 nobody nobody 6.3M Feb 21 2008 ?? ... -rw-r--r-- 1 nobody nobody 7.6M Feb 21 2008 -rw-r--r-- 1 nobody nobody 7.1M Feb 21 2008 ?? -rw-r--r-- 1 nobody nobody 7.7M Feb 21 2008 ?? and like this for finnish: drwxr-xr-x2 nobody nobody 13 Mar 2 03:20 Turmion K??til??t - Hoitovirhe drwxr-xr-x2 nobody nobody7 Mar 2 03:20 Turmion K??til??t - Niuva 20 drwxr-xr-x2 nobody nobody 13 Mar 2 03:20 Turmion K??til??t - Pirun Nyrkki drwxr-xr-x2 nobody nobody 12 Mar 2 03:20 Turmion K??til??t - U.S.C.H.! And operating on these files locally is tricky to say the least: for example I cannot do a: cd ?? for obvious reasons, because there is no directory that REALLY has all those question marks. However, I am still able to browse and operate on these files using Midnight Commander, somehow it actually works. How do I need to set the locale settings on the FreeBSD machine so that all file names are displayed correctly when operated on locally? - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
RE: RAID10 doen't boot
Hi, I'd really appreciate it if somebody could help me out! I have a box with a MB ASUS P5WDG2-WS Pro with two built-in SATA II RAID controllers (Intel ICH7R and Marvell 88SE614x). I installed 4 HDD WD WD5002ABYS (500GB each) on the 4 SATA ports of the Intel ICH7R and using the Intel Matrix Storage Manager I created a RAID10 (Strip 14KB, Size 931.5GB, Status Normal, Bootable Yes) out of these 4 HDD. Then in the BIOS I set the IDE Configuration to Configure SATA As [RAID], OnBoard Serial-ATA BOOTROM [Enabled] and disable the Marvell SATA controller, for I use only the Intel ICH7R. Then I successfully installed FreeBSD 7.1 on the RAID partition, ar0. The installation completed successfully but the system persistently didn't boot and gave this error message: F1FreeBSD Default: F1 No /boot/loader FreeBSD/i386 boot Default: 0:ad (0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel boot: No /boot/kernel/kernel Thanks a lot, Alex Hello, I know that this probably doesn't help much, but I do recall reading in several different places that support for Intel firmware raid in both FreeBSD and Linux is very shaky and limited a best. Is there any particular reason you want to use it instead of using ZFS or gmirror/gstripe/graid5? - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
RE: Compiler Flags problem with core2 CPU
See the section 3.17.14 Intel 386 and AMD x86-64 Options in the gcc Info manual. It contains a full list of the supported CPU-TYPE values for the -mtune=CPU-TYPE option. The -march=CPU-TYPE option accepts the same CPU types: `-march=CPU-TYPE' Generate instructions for the machine type CPU-TYPE. The choices for CPU-TYPE are the same as for `-mtune'. Moreover, specifying `-march=CPU-TYPE' implies `-mtune=CPU-TYPE'. Hello Out of curiosity, what is the optimal -march= value to use for the new Atom D510 CPU: http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=43098 ? Thanks - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: 8.0-RELEASE/amd64 - full ZFS install - low read and write disk performance (fixed)
Hello folks A few weeks ago, there was a discussion started by me regarding abysmal read/write performance using ZFS mirror on 8.0-RELEASE. I was using an Atom 330 system with 2GB ram and it was pointed out to me that my problem was most likely having both disks attached to a PCI SIL3124 controller, switching to the new AHCI drivers didn't help one bit. To reitirate, here are the Bonnie and DD numbers I got on that system: === Atom 330 / 2gb ram / Intel board + PCI SIL3124 ---Sequential Output ---Sequential Input-- --Random-- -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks--- MachineMB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU /sec %CPU 8192 21041 53.5 22644 19.4 13724 12.8 25321 48.5 43110 14.0 143.2 3.3 dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/test1 bs=1M count=4096 4096+0 records in 4096+0 records out 4294967296 bytes transferred in 143.878615 secs (29851325 bytes/sec) (28,4 mb/s) === Since then, I switched the exact same disks to a different system: Atom D510 / 4gb ram / Supermicro X7SPA-H / ICH9R controller (native). Here are the updated results: ---Sequential Output ---Sequential Input-- --Random-- -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks--- MachineMB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU /sec %CPU 8192 30057 68.7 50965 36.4 27236 21.3 33317 58.0 53051 14.3 172.4 3.2 dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/test1 bs=1M count=4096 4096+0 records in 4096+0 records out 4294967296 bytes transferred in 54.977978 secs (78121594 bytes/sec) (74,5 mb/s) === Write performance now seems to have increased by a factor of 2 to 3 and is now definately in line with the expected performance of the disks in question (cheap 2TB WD20EADS with 32mb cache). Thanks to everyone who has offered help and tips! - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
8.0 on new hardware and a few errors, should I be worried?
Hello I've very recently finished installing 8.0-RELEASE on some new hardware and I noticed a few error messages that make me a bit uneasy. This is a snip from my dmesg: -- acpi0: SMCI on motherboard acpi0: [ITHREAD] acpi0: Power Button (fixed) acpi0: reservation of fee0, 1000 (3) failed acpi0: reservation of 0, a (3) failed acpi0: reservation of 10, bf60 (3) failed -- What do these mean and should I worry about it? The full DMESG can be viewed here: http://jago.pp.fi/temp/dmesg.txt Additionally, while building a whole bunch of ports on this new system (about 30 or so, samba, ncftp, portaudit, bash, the usual suspects), I noticed the following in my logs during the build process: -- Feb 27 21:24:01 atombsd kernel: pid 38846 (try), uid 0: exited on signal 10 (core dumped) Feb 27 22:17:49 atombsd kernel: pid 89665 (conftest), uid 0: exited on signal 6 (core dumped) -- All ports seem to have built and installed succesfully. Again, what do these mean and should I worry about it? :) Thanks! - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
RE: booting off a ZFS pool consisting of multiple striped mirror vdevs
I don't know, but I plan to test that scenario in a few days. Matt Please share the results when you're done, I am really curious :) It *should* work... I made changes a while back that allow for multiple vdevs to attach to the root. In this case you should have 3 mirror vdevs attached to the root, so as long as the BIOS can enumerate all of the drives, we should find all of the vdevs and build the tree correctly. It should be simple enough to test in qemu, except that the BIOS in qemu is a little broken and might not id all of the drives. robert. If booting of a stripe of 3 mirrors should work assuming no BIOS bugs, can you explain why is booting off simple stripes (of any number of disks) currently unsupported? I haven't tested that myself, but everywhere I look seems to indicate that booting off a simple stripe doesn't work or is that everywhere also out of date after your changes? :) - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
booting off a ZFS pool consisting of multiple striped mirror vdevs
Hello I have succesfully tested and used a full ZFS install of FreeBSD 8.0 on both single disk and mirror disk configurations using both MBR and GPT partitioning. AFAIK, with the more recent -CURRENT and -STABLE it is also possible to boot off a root filesystem located on raidz/raidz2 pools. But what about booting off pools consisting of multiple striped mirror or raidz vdevs? Like this: Assume each disk looks like a half of a traditional ZFS mirror root configuration using GPT 1: freebsd-boot 2: freebsd-swap 3: freebsd-zfs |disk1+disk2| + |disk3+disk4| + |disk5+disk6| My logic tells me that while booting off any of the 6 disks, boot0 and boot1 stage should obviously work fine, but what about the boot2 stage? Can it properly handle booting off a root filesystem thats striped across 3 mirror vdevs or is booting off a single mirror vdev the best that one can do right now? - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
managing ZFS automatic mounts - FreeBSD deviates from Solaris?
Hello From the SUN ZFS Administration Guide: http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-5461/gaztn?a=view If ZFS is currently managing the file system but it is currently unmounted, and the mountpoint property is changed, the file system remains unmounted. This does not seem to be the case in FreeBSD (8.0-RELEASE): = zfs get mounted tank/home NAMEPROPERTYVALUE SOURCE tank/home mounted no - zfs set mountpoint=/mnt/home tank/home zfs get mounted tank/home NAMEPROPERTYVALUE SOURCE tank/home mounted no - = This might not look like a serious issue at first, until you try doing an installation of FreeBSD from FIXIT, trying to setup multiple filesystems and their mountpoints at the very end of the installation process. For example if you set the mountpoint of your poolname/rootfs/usr to /usr as one of the finishing touches to the system installation, it will immideately mount the filesystem, instantly breaking your FIXIT environment and you cannot proceed any further. Is this a known issue and/or should I submit a PR? - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: managing ZFS automatic mounts - FreeBSD deviates from Solaris?
On Sun, Feb 14, 2010 at 2:24 AM, Dan Naumov dan.nau...@gmail.com wrote: Hello From the SUN ZFS Administration Guide: http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-5461/gaztn?a=view If ZFS is currently managing the file system but it is currently unmounted, and the mountpoint property is changed, the file system remains unmounted. This does not seem to be the case in FreeBSD (8.0-RELEASE): = zfs get mounted tank/home NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE tank/home mounted no - zfs set mountpoint=/mnt/home tank/home zfs get mounted tank/home NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE tank/home mounted no - = This might not look like a serious issue at first, until you try doing an installation of FreeBSD from FIXIT, trying to setup multiple filesystems and their mountpoints at the very end of the installation process. For example if you set the mountpoint of your poolname/rootfs/usr to /usr as one of the finishing touches to the system installation, it will immideately mount the filesystem, instantly breaking your FIXIT environment and you cannot proceed any further. Is this a known issue and/or should I submit a PR? Oops, I managed to screw up my previous email. My point was to show that mounted changes to YES after changing the mountpoint property :) - Dan ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
RE: Intel D510MO Mini-ITX Motherboard - Is anyone using FreeBSD on this?
closing out this thread I did go ahead and buy one of these boards and can now report that FreeBSD-8.0/i386 boots and runs on it with no apparent problems. A user in the forums reports similar success running 8.0/amd64. Extremely quiet and inexpensive board. At around $80, it is one-third the cost of the Supermicro boards. Not much use as a space heater, however; I've had it running for more than 24 hours, busily recompiling ports, and the heatsink is just barely warm to the touch. Next time I reboot it I'm going to plug it into my Kill-a-Watt meter to measure its power draw... Reports of successes with both adm64 andi386 versions of 8.0-RELEASE and Intel D510MO board have been showing up on a few different discussion forums now. I have to correct myself in regard to the Supermicro X7SPA-H board. The board seems to be roughly 2 times as expensive as the Intel D510MO (~75$ for the D150MO vs $150-170$ for the X7SPA-H). However, these prices seem to only be like that in the US. When looking at European prices, it seems that the D510MO board goes for about 75-80 euro and the X7SPA-H goes for about 190-230 euro, depending on country and reseller. So while the Supermicro board is roughly twice as expensive as the Intel board in the US, it's roughly 3 times as expensive if you are buying in Europe. I still ended up going with the X7SPA-H though (finally pulled the plug on ordering all the parts for a new system yesterday), mainly because it saves me the trouble of immideately having to hunt for an additional disk controller card: the D510MO has only 2 SATA ports and a PCI slot for expansion (and I have REALLY burned myself badly on the performance of PCI disk controller cards in the past), while the X7SPA-H comes with 6 native SATA ports on an ICH9R controller and has a 4xPCIE (in 16x physical form) for expansion. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
booting off GPT partitions
Hey I was under the impression that everyone and their dog is using GPT partitioning in FreeBSD these days, including for boot drives and that I was just being unlucky with my current NAS motherboard (Intel D945GCLF2) having supposedly shaky support for GPT boot. But right now I am having an email exchange with Supermicro support (whom I contacted since I am pondering their X7SPA-H board for a new system), who are telling me that booting off GPT requires UEFI BIOS, which is supposedly a very new thing and that for example NONE of their current motherboards have support for this. Am I misunderstanding something or is the Supermicro support tech misguided? - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
RE: Help booting FreeBSD with a ZFS root filesystem
I didn't want a mirror though, I wanted a stripe. I still don't understand why what I'm doing isn't working. As far as I know, having the root pool on a stripe isn't supported. OpenSolaris supports having the root pool on a simple pool and a mirror pool. FreeBSD supports having the root pool on a simple pool, mirror pool and raidz, but afaik booting off raidz used to have issues. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
RE: Intel D510MO Mini-ITX Motherboard - Is anyone using FreeBSD on this?
Not to steal your discussion thread, but I thought I'd ask (and you'd perhaps too be interested) what's the status of FreeBSD on these 2: Supermicro X7SPA-H: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/ATOM/ICH9/X7SPA.cfm?typ=H Supermicro X7SPA-HF: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/ATOM/ICH9/X7SPA.cfm?typ=HIPMI=Y Supermicro recently came out with quite a bunch of Atom-based solutions and these 2 boards stuck out as havign 6 x SATA ports, which make them tempting for a NAS solution. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: 8.0-RELEASE/amd64 - full ZFS install - low read and write disk performance
On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 7:33 AM, Bob Friesenhahn bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us wrote: On Mon, 25 Jan 2010, Dan Naumov wrote: I've checked with the manufacturer and it seems that the Sil3124 in this NAS is indeed a PCI card. More info on the card in question is available at http://green-pcs.co.uk/2009/01/28/tranquil-bbs2-those-pci-cards/ I have the card described later on the page, the one with 4 SATA ports and no eSATA. Alright, so it being PCI is probably a bottleneck in some ways, but that still doesn't explain the performance THAT bad, considering that same hardware, same disks, same disk controller push over 65mb/s in both reads and writes in Win2008. And agian, I am pretty sure that I've had close to expected results when I was The slow PCI bus and this card look like the bottleneck to me. Remember that your Win2008 tests were with just one disk, your zfs performance with just one disk was similar to Win2008, and your zfs performance with a mirror was just under 1/2 that. I don't think that your performance results are necessarily out of line for the hardware you are using. On an old Sun SPARC workstation with retrofitted 15K RPM drives on Ultra-160 SCSI channel, I see a zfs mirror write performance of 67,317KB/second and a read performance of 124,347KB/second. The drives themselves are capable of 100MB/second range performance. Similar to yourself, I see 1/2 the write performance due to bandwidth limitations. Bob There is lots of very sweet irony in my particular situiation. Initially I was planning to use a single X25-M 80gb SSD in the motherboard sata port for the actual OS installation as well as to dedicate 50gb of it to a become a designaed L2ARC vdev for my ZFS mirrors. The SSD attached to the motherboard port would be recognized only as a SATA150 device for some reason, but I was still seeing 150mb/s throughput and sub 0.1 ms latencies on that disk simply because of how crazy good the X25-M's are. However I ended up having very bad issues with the Icydock 2,5 to 3,5 converter jacket I was using to keep/fit the SSD in the system and it would randomly drop write IO on heavy load due to bad connectors. Having finally figured out the cause of my OS installations to the SSD going belly up during applying updates, I decided to move the SSD to my desktop and use it there instead, additionally thinking that my perhaps my idea of the SSD was crazy overkill for what I need the system to do. Ironically now that I am seeing how horrible the performance is when I am operating on the mirror through this PCI card, I realize that actually, my idea was pretty bloody brilliant, I just didn't really know why at the time. An L2ARC device on the motherboard port would really help me with random read IO, but to work around the utterly poor write performance, I would also need a dedicaled SLOG ZIL device. The catch is that while L2ARC devices and be removed from the pool at will (should the device up and die all of a sudden), the dedicated ZILs cannot and currently a missing ZIL device will render the pool it's included in be unable to import and become inaccessible. There is some work happening in Solaris to implement removing SLOGs from a pool, but that work hasn't yet found it's way in FreeBSD yet. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: 8.0-RELEASE/amd64 - full ZFS install - low read and write disk performance
On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 9:34 AM, Dan Naumov dan.nau...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 7:33 AM, Bob Friesenhahn bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us wrote: On Mon, 25 Jan 2010, Dan Naumov wrote: I've checked with the manufacturer and it seems that the Sil3124 in this NAS is indeed a PCI card. More info on the card in question is available at http://green-pcs.co.uk/2009/01/28/tranquil-bbs2-those-pci-cards/ I have the card described later on the page, the one with 4 SATA ports and no eSATA. Alright, so it being PCI is probably a bottleneck in some ways, but that still doesn't explain the performance THAT bad, considering that same hardware, same disks, same disk controller push over 65mb/s in both reads and writes in Win2008. And agian, I am pretty sure that I've had close to expected results when I was The slow PCI bus and this card look like the bottleneck to me. Remember that your Win2008 tests were with just one disk, your zfs performance with just one disk was similar to Win2008, and your zfs performance with a mirror was just under 1/2 that. I don't think that your performance results are necessarily out of line for the hardware you are using. On an old Sun SPARC workstation with retrofitted 15K RPM drives on Ultra-160 SCSI channel, I see a zfs mirror write performance of 67,317KB/second and a read performance of 124,347KB/second. The drives themselves are capable of 100MB/second range performance. Similar to yourself, I see 1/2 the write performance due to bandwidth limitations. Bob There is lots of very sweet irony in my particular situiation. Initially I was planning to use a single X25-M 80gb SSD in the motherboard sata port for the actual OS installation as well as to dedicate 50gb of it to a become a designaed L2ARC vdev for my ZFS mirrors. The SSD attached to the motherboard port would be recognized only as a SATA150 device for some reason, but I was still seeing 150mb/s throughput and sub 0.1 ms latencies on that disk simply because of how crazy good the X25-M's are. However I ended up having very bad issues with the Icydock 2,5 to 3,5 converter jacket I was using to keep/fit the SSD in the system and it would randomly drop write IO on heavy load due to bad connectors. Having finally figured out the cause of my OS installations to the SSD going belly up during applying updates, I decided to move the SSD to my desktop and use it there instead, additionally thinking that my perhaps my idea of the SSD was crazy overkill for what I need the system to do. Ironically now that I am seeing how horrible the performance is when I am operating on the mirror through this PCI card, I realize that actually, my idea was pretty bloody brilliant, I just didn't really know why at the time. An L2ARC device on the motherboard port would really help me with random read IO, but to work around the utterly poor write performance, I would also need a dedicaled SLOG ZIL device. The catch is that while L2ARC devices and be removed from the pool at will (should the device up and die all of a sudden), the dedicated ZILs cannot and currently a missing ZIL device will render the pool it's included in be unable to import and become inaccessible. There is some work happening in Solaris to implement removing SLOGs from a pool, but that work hasn't yet found it's way in FreeBSD yet. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov OK final question: if/when I go about adding more disks to the system and want redundancy, am I right in thinking that: ZFS pool of disk1+disk2 mirror + disk3+disk4 mirror (a la RAID10) would completely murder my write and read performance even way below the current 28mb/s / 50mb/s I am seeing with 2 disks on that PCI controller and that in order to have the least negative impact, I should simply have 2 independent mirrors in 2 independent pools (with the 5th disk slot in the NAS given to a non-redundant single disk running off the one available SATA port on the motherboard)? - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: 8.0-RELEASE/amd64 - full ZFS install - low read and write disk performance
On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 7:40 PM, Alexander Motin m...@freebsd.org wrote: Artem Belevich wrote: aoc-sat2-mv8 was somewhat slower compared to ICH9 or LSI1068 controllers when I tried it with 6 and 8 disks. I think the problem is that MV8 only does 32K per transfer and that does seem to matter when you have 8 drives hooked up to it. I don't have hard numbers, but peak throughput of MV8 with 8-disk raidz2 was noticeably lower than that of LSI1068 in the same configuration. Both LSI1068 and MV2 were on the same PCI-X bus. It could be a driver limitation. The driver for Marvel SATA controllers in NetBSD seems a bit more advanced compared to what's in FreeBSD. I also wouldn't recommend to use Marvell 88SXx0xx controllers now. While potentially they are interesting, lack of documentation and numerous hardware bugs make existing FreeBSD driver very limited there. I wish intel would make cheap multi-port PCIe SATA card based on their AHCI controllers. Indeed. Intel on-board AHCI SATA controllers are fastest from all I have tested. Unluckily, they are not producing discrete versions. :( Now, if discrete solution is really needed, I would still recommend SiI3124, but with proper PCI-X 64bit/133MHz bus or built-in PCIe x8 bridge. They are fast and have good new siis driver. On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 3:29 AM, Pete French petefre...@ticketswitch.com wrote: I like to use pci-x with aoc-sat2-mv8 cards or pci-e cardsthat way you get a lot more bandwidth.. I would goalong with that - I have precisely the same controller, with a pair of eSATA drives, running ZFS mirrored. But I get a nice 100 meg/second out of them if I try. My controller is, however on PCI-X, not PCI. It's a shame PCI-X appears to have gone the way of the dinosaur :-( -- Alexander Motin Alexander, since you seem to be experienced in the area, what do you think of these 2 for use in a FreeBSD8 ZFS NAS: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/ATOM/ICH9/X7SPA.cfm?typ=H http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/ATOM/ICH9/X7SPA.cfm?typ=HIPMI=Y - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: 8.0-RELEASE/amd64 - full ZFS install - low read and write disk performance
On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 8:32 PM, Alexander Motin m...@freebsd.org wrote: Dan Naumov wrote: Alexander, since you seem to be experienced in the area, what do you think of these 2 for use in a FreeBSD8 ZFS NAS: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/ATOM/ICH9/X7SPA.cfm?typ=H http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/ATOM/ICH9/X7SPA.cfm?typ=HIPMI=Y Unluckily I haven't yet touched Atom family close yet, so I can't say about it's performance. But higher desktop level (even bit old) ICH9R chipset there is IMHO a good option. It is MUCH better then ICH7, often used with previous Atoms. If I had nice small Mini-ITX case with 6 drive bays, I would definitely look for some board like that to build home storage. -- Alexander Motin CPU-performance-wise, I am not really worried. The current system is an Atom 330 and even that is a bit overkill for what I do with it and from what I am seeing, the new Atom D510 used on those boards is a tiny bit faster. What I want and care about for this system are reliability, stability, low power use, quietness and fast disk read/write speeds. I've been hearing some praise of ICH9R and 6 native SATA ports should be enough for my needs. AFAIK, the Intel 82574L network cards included on those are also very well supported? - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Loader, MBR and the boot process
On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 5:29 PM, John j...@starfire.mn.org wrote: On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 07:02:53AM +0200, Dan Naumov wrote: On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 6:49 AM, Dan Naumov dan.nau...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 6:12 AM, Thomas K. f...@gothschlampen.com wrote: On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 05:57:23AM +0200, Dan Naumov wrote: Hi, I recently found a nifty FreeBSD ZFS root installation script and been reworking it a bit to suit my needs better, including changing it from GPT to MBR partitioning. However, I was stumped, even though I had done everything right (or so I thought), the system would get stuck at Loader and refuse to go anywhere. After trying over a dozen probably this line is the cause: dd if=/mnt2/boot/zfsboot of=/dev/${TARGETDISK}s1a skip=1 seek=1024 Unless by swap first you meant the on-disk location, and not the partition letter. If swap is partition a, you're writing the loader into swapspace. Regards, Thomas At first you made me feel silly, but then I decided to double-check, I uncommented the swap line in the partitioning part again, ensured I was writing the bootloader to ${TARGETDISK}s1b and ran the script. Same problem, hangs at loader. Again, if I comment out the swap, giving the entire slice to ZFS and then write the bootloader to ${TARGETDISK}s1a, run the script, everything works. I have also just tested creating 2 slices, like this: gpart create -s mbr ${TARGETDISK} gpart add -s 3G -t freebsd ${TARGETDISK} gpart create -s BSD ${TARGETDISK}s1 gpart add -t freebsd-swap ${TARGETDISK}s1 gpart add -t freebsd ${TARGETDISK} gpart create -s BSD ${TARGETDISK}s2 gpart add -t freebsd-zfs ${TARGETDISK}s2 gpart set -a active -i 2 ${TARGETDISK} gpart bootcode -b /mnt2/boot/boot0 ${TARGETDISK} and later: dd if=/mnt2/boot/zfsboot of=/dev/${TARGETDISK}s2 count=1 dd if=/mnt2/boot/zfsboot of=/dev/${TARGETDISK}s2a skip=1 seek=1024 Putting the swap into it's own slice and then putting FreeBSD into it's own slice worked fine. So why the hell can't they both coexist in 1 slice if the swap comes first? I know what the answer to this USED to be, but I don't know if it is still true (obviously, I think so, I or wouldn't waste your time). The filesystem code is all carefully written to avoid the very first few sector of the partition. That's because the partition table is there for the first filesystem of the slice (or disk). That's a tiny amout of space wasted, because it's also skipped on all the other filesystems even though there's not actually anything there, but it was a small inefficency, even in the 70's. Swap does not behave that way. SWAP will begin right at the slice boundry, with 0 offset. As long as it's not the first partition, no harm, no foul. If it IS the first partition, you just nuked your partition table. As long as SWAP owns the slice, again, no harm, no foul, but if there were filesystems BEHIND it, you just lost 'em. That's the way it always used to be, and I think it still is. SWAP can only be first if it is the ONLY thing using that slice (disk), otherwise, you need a filesystem first to protect the partition table. -- John Lind j...@starfire.mn.org This explanation does sound logical, but holy crap, if this is the case, you'd think there would be bells, whistles and huge red label warnings in EVERY FreeBSD installation / partitioning guide out there warning people to not put swap first (unless given a dedicated slice) under any circumstances. The warnings were nowhere to be seen and lots of pointy hair first greyed and were then lost during the process of me trying to figure out why my system would install but wouldn't boot. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
8.0-RELEASE/amd64 - full ZFS install - low read and write disk performance
=6.278 msec Short backward: 400 iter in 2.233714 sec =5.584 msec Seq outer: 2048 iter in 0.427523 sec =0.209 msec Seq inner: 2048 iter in 0.341185 sec =0.167 msec Transfer rates: outside: 102400 kbytes in 1.516305 sec =67533 kbytes/sec middle:102400 kbytes in 1.351877 sec =75747 kbytes/sec inside:102400 kbytes in 2.090069 sec =48994 kbytes/sec === The exact same disks, on the exact same machine, are well capable of 65+ mb/s throughput (tested with ATTO multiple times) with different block sizes using Windows 2008 Server and NTFS. So what would be the cause of these very low Bonnie result numbers in my case? Should I try some other benchmark and if so, with what parameters? - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: 8.0-RELEASE/amd64 - full ZFS install - low read and write disk performance
to the same controller. Only difference was that in Windows the disks weren't in a mirror configuration but were tested individually. I do understand that a mirror setup offers roughly the same write speed as individual disk, while the read speed usually varies from equal to individual disk speed to nearly the throughput of both disks combined depending on the implementation, but there is no obvious reason I am seeing why my setup offers both read and write speeds roughly 1/3 to 1/2 of what the individual disks are capable of. Dmesg shows: atapci0: SiI 3124 SATA300 controller port 0x1000-0x100f mem 0x90108000-0x9010807f,0x9010-0x90107fff irq 21 at device 0.0 on pci4 ad8: 1907729MB WDC WD20EADS-32R6B0 01.00A01 at ata4-master SATA300 ad10: 1907729MB WDC WD20EADS-00R6B0 01.00A01 at ata5-master SATA300 I do recall also testing an alternative configuration in the past, where I would boot off an UFS disk and have the ZFS mirror consist of 2 discs directly. The bonnie numbers in that case were in line with my expectations, I was seeing 65-70mb/s. Note: again, exact same hardware, exact same disks attached to the exact same controller. In my knowledge, Solaris/OpenSolaris has an issue where they have to automatically disable disk cache if ZFS is used on top of partitions instead of raw disks, but to my knowledge (I recall reading this from multiple reputable sources) this issue does not affect FreeBSD. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: 8.0-RELEASE/amd64 - full ZFS install - low read and write disk performance
On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 7:42 PM, Dan Naumov dan.nau...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 7:05 PM, Jason Edwards sub.m...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Dan, I read on FreeBSD mailinglist you had some performance issues with ZFS. Perhaps i can help you with that. You seem to be running a single mirror, which means you won't have any speed benefit regarding writes, and usually RAID1 implementations offer little to no acceleration to read requests also; some even just read from the master disk and don't touch the 'slave' mirrored disk unless when writing. ZFS is alot more modern however, although i did not test performance of its mirror implementation. But, benchmarking I/O can be tricky: 1) you use bonnie, but bonnie's tests are performed without a 'cooldown' period between the tests; meaning that when test 2 starts, data from test 1 is still being processed. For single disks and simple I/O this is not so bad, but for large write-back buffers and more complex I/O buffering, this may be inappropriate. I had patched bonnie some time in the past, but if you just want a MB/s number you can use DD for that. 2) The diskinfo tiny benchmark is single queue only i assume, meaning that it would not scale well or at all on RAID-arrays. Actual filesystems on RAID-arrays use multiple-queue; meaning it would not read one sector at a time, but read 8 blocks (of 16KiB) ahead; this is called read-ahead and for traditional UFS filesystems its controlled by the sysctl vfs.read_max variable. ZFS works differently though, but you still need a real benchmark. 3) You need low-latency hardware; in particular, no PCI controller should be used. Only PCI-express based controllers or chipset-integrated Serial ATA cotrollers have proper performance. PCI can hurt performance very badly, and has high interrupt CPU usage. Generally you should avoid PCI. PCI-express is fine though, its a completely different interface that is in many ways the opposite of what PCI was. 4) Testing actual realistic I/O performance (in IOps) is very difficult. But testing sequential performance should be alot easier. You may try using dd for this. For example, you can use dd on raw devices: dd if=/dev/ad4 of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1000 I will explain each parameter: if=/dev/ad4 is the input file, the read source of=/dev/null is the output file, the write destination. /dev/null means it just goes no-where; so this is a read-only benchmark bs=1M is the blocksize, howmuch data to transfer per time. default is 512 or the sector size; but that's very slow. A value between 64KiB and 1024KiB is appropriate. bs=1M will select 1MiB or 1024KiB. count=1000 means transfer 1000 pieces, and with bs=1M that means 1000 * 1MiB = 1000MiB. This example was raw reading sequentially from the start of the device /dev/ad4. If you want to test RAIDs, you need to work at the filesystem level. You can use dd for that too: dd if=/dev/zero of=/path/to/ZFS/mount/zerofile.000 bs=1M count=2000 This command will read from /dev/zero (all zeroes) and write to a file on ZFS-mounted filesystem, it will create the file zerofile.000 and write 2000MiB of zeroes to that file. So this command tests write-performance of the ZFS-mounted filesystem. To test read performance, you need to clear caches first by unmounting that filesystem and re-mounting it again. This would free up memory containing parts of the filesystem as cached (reported in top as Inact(ive) instead of Free). Please do make sure you double-check a dd command before running it, and run as normal user instead of root. A wrong dd command may write to the wrong destination and do things you don't want. The only real thing you need to check is the write destination (of=). That's where dd is going to write to, so make sure its the target you intended. A common mistake made by myself was to write dd of=... if=... (starting with of instead of if) and thus actually doing something the other way around than what i was meant to do. This can be disastrous if you work with live data, so be careful! ;-) Hope any of this was helpful. During the dd benchmark, you can of course open a second SSH terminal and start gstat to see the devices current I/O stats. Kind regards, Jason Hi and thanks for your tips, I appreciate it :) [j...@atombsd ~]$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/home/jago/test1 bs=1M count=1024 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes transferred in 36.206372 secs (29656156 bytes/sec) [j...@atombsd ~]$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/home/jago/test2 bs=1M count=4096 4096+0 records in 4096+0 records out 4294967296 bytes transferred in 143.878615 secs (29851325 bytes/sec) This works out to 1GB in 36,2 seconds / 28,2mb/s in the first test and 4GB in 143.8 seconds / 28,4mb/s and somewhat consistent with the bonnie results. It also sadly seems to confirm the very slow speed :( The disks are attached to a 4-port Sil3124 controller and again, my
Re: 8.0-RELEASE/amd64 - full ZFS install - low read and write disk performance
On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 8:12 PM, Bob Friesenhahn bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us wrote: On Sun, 24 Jan 2010, Dan Naumov wrote: This works out to 1GB in 36,2 seconds / 28,2mb/s in the first test and 4GB in 143.8 seconds / 28,4mb/s and somewhat consistent with the bonnie results. It also sadly seems to confirm the very slow speed :( The disks are attached to a 4-port Sil3124 controller and again, my Windows benchmarks showing 65mb/s+ were done on exact same machine, with same disks attached to the same controller. Only difference was that in Windows the disks weren't in a mirror configuration but were tested individually. I do understand that a mirror setup offers roughly the same write speed as individual disk, while the read speed usually varies from equal to individual disk speed to nearly the throughput of both disks combined depending on the implementation, but there is no obvious reason I am seeing why my setup offers both read and write speeds roughly 1/3 to 1/2 of what the individual disks are capable of. Dmesg shows: There is a mistatement in the above in that a mirror setup offers roughly the same write speed as individual disk. It is possible for a mirror setup to offer a similar write speed to an individual disk, but it is also quite possible to get 1/2 (or even 1/3) the speed. ZFS writes to a mirror pair requires two independent writes. If these writes go down independent I/O paths, then there is hardly any overhead from the 2nd write. If the writes go through a bandwidth-limited shared path then they will contend for that bandwidth and you will see much less write performance. As a simple test, you can temporarily remove the mirror device from the pool and see if the write performance dramatically improves. Before doing that, it is useful to see the output of 'iostat -x 30' while under heavy write load to see if one device shows a much higher svc_t value than the other. Ow, ow, WHOA: atombsd# zpool offline tank ad8s1a [j...@atombsd ~]$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/home/jago/test3 bs=1M count=1024 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes transferred in 16.826016 secs (63814382 bytes/sec) Offlining one half of the mirror bumps DD write speed from 28mb/s to 64mb/s! Let's see how Bonnie results change: Mirror with both parts attached: ---Sequential Output ---Sequential Input-- --Random-- -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks--- MachineMB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU /sec %CPU 8192 18235 46.7 23137 19.9 13927 13.6 24818 49.3 44919 17.3 134.3 2.1 Mirror with 1 half offline: ---Sequential Output ---Sequential Input-- --Random-- -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks--- MachineMB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU /sec %CPU 1024 22888 58.0 41832 35.1 22764 22.0 26775 52.3 54233 18.3 166.0 1.6 Ok, the Bonnie results have improved, but only very little. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: 8.0-RELEASE/amd64 - full ZFS install - low read and write disk performance
On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 8:34 PM, Jason Edwards sub.m...@gmail.com wrote: ZFS writes to a mirror pair requires two independent writes. If these writes go down independent I/O paths, then there is hardly any overhead from the 2nd write. If the writes go through a bandwidth-limited shared path then they will contend for that bandwidth and you will see much less write performance. What he said may confirm my suspicion on PCI. So if you could try the same with real Serial ATA via chipset or PCI-e controller you can confirm this story. I would be very interested. :P Kind regards, Jason This wouldn't explain why ZFS mirror on 2 disks directly, on the exact same controller (with the OS running off a separate disks) results in expected performance, while having the OS run off/on a ZFS mirror running on top of MBR-partitioned disks, on the same controller, results in very low speed. - Dan ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: 8.0-RELEASE/amd64 - full ZFS install - low read and write disk performance
On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 11:53 PM, Alexander Motin m...@freebsd.org wrote: Dan Naumov wrote: This works out to 1GB in 36,2 seconds / 28,2mb/s in the first test and 4GB in 143.8 seconds / 28,4mb/s and somewhat consistent with the bonnie results. It also sadly seems to confirm the very slow speed :( The disks are attached to a 4-port Sil3124 controller and again, my Windows benchmarks showing 65mb/s+ were done on exact same machine, with same disks attached to the same controller. Only difference was that in Windows the disks weren't in a mirror configuration but were tested individually. I do understand that a mirror setup offers roughly the same write speed as individual disk, while the read speed usually varies from equal to individual disk speed to nearly the throughput of both disks combined depending on the implementation, but there is no obvious reason I am seeing why my setup offers both read and write speeds roughly 1/3 to 1/2 of what the individual disks are capable of. Dmesg shows: atapci0: SiI 3124 SATA300 controller port 0x1000-0x100f mem 0x90108000-0x9010807f,0x9010-0x90107fff irq 21 at device 0.0 on pci4 ad8: 1907729MB WDC WD20EADS-32R6B0 01.00A01 at ata4-master SATA300 ad10: 1907729MB WDC WD20EADS-00R6B0 01.00A01 at ata5-master SATA300 8.0-RELEASE, and especially 8-STABLE provide alternative, much more functional driver for this controller, named siis(4). If your SiI3124 card installed into proper bus (PCI-X or PCIe x4/x8), it can be really fast (up to 1GB/s was measured). -- Alexander Motin Sadly, it seems that utilizing the new siis driver doesn't do much good: Before utilizing siis: iozone -s 4096M -r 512 -i0 -i1 random randombkwd record stride KB reclen write rewritereadrereadread writeread rewrite read fwrite frewrite fread freread 4194304 512 28796 287665161050695 After enabling siis in loader.conf (and ensuring the disks show up as ada): iozone -s 4096M -r 512 -i0 -i1 random randombkwd record stride KB reclen write rewritereadrereadread writeread rewrite read fwrite frewrite fread freread 4194304 512 28781 288974721450540 I've checked with the manufacturer and it seems that the Sil3124 in this NAS is indeed a PCI card. More info on the card in question is available at http://green-pcs.co.uk/2009/01/28/tranquil-bbs2-those-pci-cards/ I have the card described later on the page, the one with 4 SATA ports and no eSATA. Alright, so it being PCI is probably a bottleneck in some ways, but that still doesn't explain the performance THAT bad, considering that same hardware, same disks, same disk controller push over 65mb/s in both reads and writes in Win2008. And agian, I am pretty sure that I've had close to expected results when I was booting an UFS FreeBSD installation off an SSD (attached directly to SATA port on the motherboard) while running the same kinds of benchmarks with Bonnie and DD on a ZFS mirror made directly on top of 2 raw disks. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: 8.0-RELEASE/amd64 - full ZFS install - low read and write disk performance
On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 2:14 AM, Dan Naumov dan.nau...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 11:53 PM, Alexander Motin m...@freebsd.org wrote: Dan Naumov wrote: This works out to 1GB in 36,2 seconds / 28,2mb/s in the first test and 4GB in 143.8 seconds / 28,4mb/s and somewhat consistent with the bonnie results. It also sadly seems to confirm the very slow speed :( The disks are attached to a 4-port Sil3124 controller and again, my Windows benchmarks showing 65mb/s+ were done on exact same machine, with same disks attached to the same controller. Only difference was that in Windows the disks weren't in a mirror configuration but were tested individually. I do understand that a mirror setup offers roughly the same write speed as individual disk, while the read speed usually varies from equal to individual disk speed to nearly the throughput of both disks combined depending on the implementation, but there is no obvious reason I am seeing why my setup offers both read and write speeds roughly 1/3 to 1/2 of what the individual disks are capable of. Dmesg shows: atapci0: SiI 3124 SATA300 controller port 0x1000-0x100f mem 0x90108000-0x9010807f,0x9010-0x90107fff irq 21 at device 0.0 on pci4 ad8: 1907729MB WDC WD20EADS-32R6B0 01.00A01 at ata4-master SATA300 ad10: 1907729MB WDC WD20EADS-00R6B0 01.00A01 at ata5-master SATA300 8.0-RELEASE, and especially 8-STABLE provide alternative, much more functional driver for this controller, named siis(4). If your SiI3124 card installed into proper bus (PCI-X or PCIe x4/x8), it can be really fast (up to 1GB/s was measured). -- Alexander Motin Sadly, it seems that utilizing the new siis driver doesn't do much good: Before utilizing siis: iozone -s 4096M -r 512 -i0 -i1 random random bkwd record stride KB reclen write rewrite read reread read write read rewrite read fwrite frewrite fread freread 4194304 512 28796 28766 51610 50695 After enabling siis in loader.conf (and ensuring the disks show up as ada): iozone -s 4096M -r 512 -i0 -i1 random random bkwd record stride KB reclen write rewrite read reread read write read rewrite read fwrite frewrite fread freread 4194304 512 28781 28897 47214 50540 Just to add to the numbers above, exact same benchmark, on 1 disk (detached 2nd disk from the mirror) while using the siis driver: random randombkwd record stride KB reclen write rewritereadrereadread writeread rewrite read fwrite frewrite fread freread 4194304 512 57760 563716886774047 - Dan ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
posting coding bounties, appropriate money amounts?
Hello I am curious about posting some coding bounties, my current interest revolves around improving the ZVOL functionality in FreeBSD: fixing the known ZVOL SWAP reliability/stability problems as well as making ZVOLs work as a dumpon device (as is already the case in OpenSolaris) for crash dumps. I am a private individual and not some huge Fortune 100 and while I am not exactly rich, I am willing to put some of my personal money towards this. I am curious though, what would be the best way to approach this: directly approaching committer(s) with the know-how-and-why of the areas involved or through the FreeBSD Foundation? And how would one go about calculating the appropriate amount of money for such a thing? Thanks. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
RE: Drive errors in raidz array
I have a system with 24 drives in raidz2. Congrats, you answered your own question within the first sentance :) ANSWER: As per the ZFS documentation, don't do raidz/raidz2 vdev groups bigger than 9 vdevs per group or bad things (tm) will happen. Google will tell you more. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Loader, MBR and the boot process
I recently found a nifty FreeBSD ZFS root installation script and been reworking it a bit to suit my needs better, including changing it from GPT to MBR partitioning. However, I was stumped, even though I had done everything right (or so I thought), the system would get stuck at Loader and refuse to go anywhere. After trying over a dozen different things, it downed on me to change the partition order inside the slice, I had 1) swap 2) freebsd-zfs and for the test, I got rid of swap altogether and gave the entire slice to the freebsd-zfs partition. Suddenly, my problem went away and the system booted just fine. So it seems that Loader requires that the partition containing the files vital to the boot is the first partition on the slice and that swap first, then the rest doesn't work. The thing is, I am absolutely positive that in the past, I've had sysinstall created installs using MBR partitioning and that I had swap as my first partition inside the slice and that it all worked dandy. Has this changed at some point? Oh, and for the curious the installation script is here: http://jago.pp.fi/zfsmbrv1-works.sh - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Loader, MBR and the boot process
On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 6:12 AM, Thomas K. f...@gothschlampen.com wrote: On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 05:57:23AM +0200, Dan Naumov wrote: Hi, I recently found a nifty FreeBSD ZFS root installation script and been reworking it a bit to suit my needs better, including changing it from GPT to MBR partitioning. However, I was stumped, even though I had done everything right (or so I thought), the system would get stuck at Loader and refuse to go anywhere. After trying over a dozen probably this line is the cause: dd if=/mnt2/boot/zfsboot of=/dev/${TARGETDISK}s1a skip=1 seek=1024 Unless by swap first you meant the on-disk location, and not the partition letter. If swap is partition a, you're writing the loader into swapspace. Regards, Thomas At first you made me feel silly, but then I decided to double-check, I uncommented the swap line in the partitioning part again, ensured I was writing the bootloader to ${TARGETDISK}s1b and ran the script. Same problem, hangs at loader. Again, if I comment out the swap, giving the entire slice to ZFS and then write the bootloader to ${TARGETDISK}s1a, run the script, everything works. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Loader, MBR and the boot process
On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 6:49 AM, Dan Naumov dan.nau...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 6:12 AM, Thomas K. f...@gothschlampen.com wrote: On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 05:57:23AM +0200, Dan Naumov wrote: Hi, I recently found a nifty FreeBSD ZFS root installation script and been reworking it a bit to suit my needs better, including changing it from GPT to MBR partitioning. However, I was stumped, even though I had done everything right (or so I thought), the system would get stuck at Loader and refuse to go anywhere. After trying over a dozen probably this line is the cause: dd if=/mnt2/boot/zfsboot of=/dev/${TARGETDISK}s1a skip=1 seek=1024 Unless by swap first you meant the on-disk location, and not the partition letter. If swap is partition a, you're writing the loader into swapspace. Regards, Thomas At first you made me feel silly, but then I decided to double-check, I uncommented the swap line in the partitioning part again, ensured I was writing the bootloader to ${TARGETDISK}s1b and ran the script. Same problem, hangs at loader. Again, if I comment out the swap, giving the entire slice to ZFS and then write the bootloader to ${TARGETDISK}s1a, run the script, everything works. I have also just tested creating 2 slices, like this: gpart create -s mbr ${TARGETDISK} gpart add -s 3G -t freebsd ${TARGETDISK} gpart create -s BSD ${TARGETDISK}s1 gpart add -t freebsd-swap ${TARGETDISK}s1 gpart add -t freebsd ${TARGETDISK} gpart create -s BSD ${TARGETDISK}s2 gpart add -t freebsd-zfs ${TARGETDISK}s2 gpart set -a active -i 2 ${TARGETDISK} gpart bootcode -b /mnt2/boot/boot0 ${TARGETDISK} and later: dd if=/mnt2/boot/zfsboot of=/dev/${TARGETDISK}s2 count=1 dd if=/mnt2/boot/zfsboot of=/dev/${TARGETDISK}s2a skip=1 seek=1024 Putting the swap into it's own slice and then putting FreeBSD into it's own slice worked fine. So why the hell can't they both coexist in 1 slice if the swap comes first? - Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
8.0-RELEASE / gpart / GPT / marking a partition as active
It seems that quite a few BIOSes have serious issues booting off disks using GPT partitioning when no partition present is marked as active. See http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=115406cat=bin for a prime example. In 8.0-RELEASE, using gpart, setting a slice as active in MBR partitioning mode is trivial, ie: gpart set -a active -i 1 DISKNAME However, trying to do the same thing with GPT partitioning yields no results: gpart set -a active -i 1 DISKNAME gpart: attrib 'active': Device not configured As a result of this issue, I can configure and make a succesfull install using GPT in 8.0, but I cannot boot off it using my Intel D945GCLF2 board. I have found this discussion from about a month ago: http://www.mail-archive.com/freebsd-sta...@freebsd.org/msg106918.html where Robert mentions that gpart set -a active -i 1 is no longer needed in 8-STABLE, because the pmbr will be marked as active during the installation of the bootcode. Is there anything I can do to archieve the same result in 8.0-RELEASE or is installing from a snapshop of 8-STABLE my only option? Thanks. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: 8.0-RELEASE / gpart / GPT / marking a partition as active
On 1/19/2010 12:11 PM, Dan Naumov wrote: It seems that quite a few BIOSes have serious issues booting off disks using GPT partitioning when no partition present is marked as active. See http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=115406cat=bin for a prime example. In 8.0-RELEASE, using gpart, setting a slice as active in MBR partitioning mode is trivial, ie: gpart set -a active -i 1 DISKNAME However, trying to do the same thing with GPT partitioning yields no results: gpart set -a active -i 1 DISKNAME gpart: attrib 'active': Device not configured As a result of this issue, I can configure and make a succesfull install using GPT in 8.0, but I cannot boot off it using my Intel D945GCLF2 board. I have found this discussion from about a month ago: http://www.mail-archive.com/freebsd-sta...@freebsd.org/msg106918.html where Robert mentions that gpart set -a active -i 1 is no longer needed in 8-STABLE, because the pmbr will be marked as active during the installation of the bootcode. Is there anything I can do to archieve the same result in 8.0-RELEASE or is installing from a snapshop of 8-STABLE my only option? After using gpart to create the GPT (and thus the PMBR and its bootcode), why not simply use fdisk -a -1 DISKNAME to set the PMBR partition active? According to the fdisk output, the partition flag did change from 0 to 80. Can the fdisk: Class not found error showing up at the very end of the procedure of doing fdisk -a -1 DISKNAME be safely ignored? - Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
(SOLVED) Re: installing FreeBSD 8 on SSDs and UFS2 - partition alignment, block sizes, what does one need to know?
On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 6:38 PM, Rick Macklem rmack...@uoguelph.ca wrote: On Tue, 12 Jan 2010, Dan Naumov wrote: For my upcoming storage system, the OS install is going to be on a 80gb Intel SSD disk and for various reasons, I am now pretty convinced to stick with UFS2 for the root partition (the actual data pool will be ZFS using traditional SATA disks). I am probably going to use GPT partitioning and have the SSD host the swap, boot, root and a few other partitions. What do I need to know in regards to partition alignment and filesystem block sizes to get the best performance out of the Intel SSDs? I can't help with your question, but I thought I'd mention that there was a recent post (on freebsd-current, I think?) w.r.t. using an SSD for the ZFS log file. It suggested that that helped with ZFS perf., so you might want to look for the message. rick I have managed to figure out the essential things to know by know, I just wish there was a single, easy to grasp webpage or HOWTO describing and whys and hows so I wouldn't have had had to spend the entire day googling things to get a proper grasp on the issue :) To (perhaps a bit too much) simplify things, if you are using an SSD with FreeeBSD, you: 1) Should use GPT 2) Should create the freebsd-boot partition as normal (to ensure compatibility with some funky BIOSes) 3) All additional partitions should be aligned, meaning that their boundaries should be dividable by 1024kb (that's 2048 logical blocks in gpart). Ie, having created your freeebsd-boot, your next partition should start at block 2048 and the partition size should be dividable by 2048 blocks. This applies to ALL further partitions added to the disk, so you WILL end up having some empty space between them, but a few MBs worth of space will be lost at most. P.S: My oversimplification was in that MOST SSDs will be just fine with a 512 kb / 1024 block alignment. However, _ALL_ SSDs will be fine with 1024 kb / 2048 block alignment. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
installing FreeBSD 8 on SSDs and UFS2 - partition alignment, block sizes, what does one need to know?
For my upcoming storage system, the OS install is going to be on a 80gb Intel SSD disk and for various reasons, I am now pretty convinced to stick with UFS2 for the root partition (the actual data pool will be ZFS using traditional SATA disks). I am probably going to use GPT partitioning and have the SSD host the swap, boot, root and a few other partitions. What do I need to know in regards to partition alignment and filesystem block sizes to get the best performance out of the Intel SSDs? Thanks. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: ZFS on top of GELI
2010/1/12 Rafał Jackiewicz free...@o2.pl: Thanks, could you do the same, but using 2 .eli vdevs mirrorred together in a zfs mirror? - Sincerely, Dan Naumov Hi, Proc: Intell Atom 330 (2x1.6Ghz) - 1 package(s) x 2 core(s) x 2 HTT threads Chipset: Intel 82945G Sys: 8.0-RELEASE FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE #0 empty file: /boot/loader.conf Hdd: ad4: 953869MB Seagate ST31000533CS SC15 at ata2-master SATA150 ad6: 953869MB Seagate ST31000533CS SC15 at ata3-master SATA150 Geli: geli init -s 4096 -K /etc/keys/ad4s2.key /dev/ad4s2 geli init -s 4096 -K /etc/keys/ad6s2.key /dev/ad6s2 Results: *** single drive write MB/s read MB/s eli.journal.ufs2 23 14 eli.zfs 19 36 *** mirror write MB/s read MB/s mirror.eli.journal.ufs2 23 16 eli.zfs 31 40 zfs 83 79 *** degraded mirror write MB/s read MB/s mirror.eli.journal.ufs2 16 9 eli.zfs 56 40 zfs 86 71 Thanks a lot for your numbers, the relevant part for me was this: *** mirror write MB/s read MB/s eli.zfs 31 40 zfs 83 79 *** degraded mirror write MB/s read MB/s eli.zfs 56 40 zfs 86 71 31 mb/s writes and 40 mb/s reads is something that I guess I could potentially live with. I am guessing the main problem of stacking ZFS on top of geli like this is the fact that writing to a mirror requires double the CPU use, because we have to encrypt all written data twice (once to each disk) instead of encrypting first and then writing the encrypted data to 2 disks as would be the case if we had crypto sitting on top of ZFS instead of ZFS sitting on top of crypto. I now have to reevaluate my planned use of an SSD though, I was planning to use a 40gb partition on an Intel 80GB X25-M G2 as a dedicated L2ARC device for a ZFS mirror of 2 x 2tb disks. However these numbers make it quite obvious that I would already be CPU-starved at 40-50mb/s throughput on the encrypted ZFS mirror, so adding an l2arc SSD, while improving latency, would do really nothing for actual disk read speeds, considering the l2arc itself would too, have to sit on top of a GELI device. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
a question on ZFS boot/root in 8.0-RELEASE
Hello list. My concern is this: I really really like freebsd-update and want to continue using it. Freebsd-update however, assumes that no part of your base system has been compiled by hand, it's intended to be used to update from official binaries to other official binaries. I am also gathering (from things I've read so far) that you HAVE to build a custom loader if you want to boot off a ZFS mirror or raidz... but what about a non-redundant ZFS pool as system root in 8.0-RELEASE? Can I have a full ZFS FreeBSD installation on a non-redundant ZFS pool and have the system boot off it without having to compile anything manually with the existing binaries provided on the 8.0 install DVD? - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
bin/115406: [patch] gpt(8) GPT MBR hangs award BIOS on boot
I have a few questions about this PR: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=115406cat=bin 1) Is this bug now officially fixed as of 8.0-RELEASE? Ie, can I expect to set up a completely GPT-based system using an Intel D945GCLF2 board and not have the installation crap out on me later? 2) The very last entry into the PR states the following: The problem has been addressed in gart(8) and gpt(8) is obsolete, so no follow-up is to be expected at this time. Close the PR to reflect this. What exactly is gart and where do I find it's manpage, http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi comes up with nothing? Also, does this mean that GPT is _NOT_ in fact fixed regarding this bug? Thanks. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
configuring and ssh tunneling xorg from a headless FreeBSD machine
Hello list. I have the following setup: a Windows Vista x64 SP1 machine (my primary desktop) and a FreeBSD 7.2/amd64 running on a home NAS system that's relatively powerful (Intel Atom 330 dualcore, 2gb ram). I would like to be able to run xorg and a simple desktop on the headless FreeBSD NAS and be able to interact with it from my Vista machine. What are the steps I need to take for this? Obviously I need to build xorg and some sort of a wm (probably gnome2-lite) on the FreeBSD machine and install an xserver on the Vista machine, but then what? Any pointers to guides and such are welcome. Please keep me CCed as I am not subscribed. - Sincerely, Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
sponsoring ZFS development on FreeBSD
Hello My question is concerning sponsoring the FreeBSD project and ZFS development in particular. I know I am just a relatively poor person so I can't contribute much (maybe on the order of 20-30 euro a month), but I keep seeing FreeBSD core team members keep mentioning we value donations of all sizes, so what the hell :) Anyways, in the past I have directed my donations to The FreeBSD Foundation, if I want to ensure that as much of my money as possible goes directly to benefit the development of ZFS support on FreeBSD, should I continue donating to the foundation or should I be sending donations directly to specific developers? Sincerely - Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
pkg_deinstall: delete all packages installed, except for X, Y and Z
Hello list. I am trying to clean up a system with a LOT of cruft. Is there some argument I could pass to pkg_deinstall that would result in delete all packages installed, except for X, Y and Z (and obviously their dependancies)? Thanks! - Dan Naumov ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: pkg_deinstall: delete all packages installed, except for X, Y and Z
Thanks a lot, this worked like a charm! - Dan Naumov On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 12:09 PM, Wojciech Pucharwoj...@wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl wrote: Hello list. I am trying to clean up a system with a LOT of cruft. Is there some argument I could pass to pkg_deinstall that would result in delete all packages installed, except for X, Y and Z (and obviously their dependancies)? just do pkg_info |cut -f 1 -d /tmp/pkglist edit pkglist and delete lines X, Y and Z do pkg_delete `cat /tmp/pkglist` rm /tmp/pkglist ignore errors about package can't be deleted because X, Y or Z requires it. it's exactly what you want. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org