FreeBSD Fans,
Okay, I'm not exactly a "new" user. I've been running FreeBSD for about a
year or so on my web/mail server, which I only have remote access to.
It's currently running 6.3.
Saturday I finally found one of those "round tuits" and switched my home
PC from Debian to FreeBSD. I've been a Linux user since the 1.xx Linux
kernel days, so it took quite a bit of convincing myself to make the
switch. But other than needing to unlearn some bad habits I got into
thanks to Linux, I'm feeling right at home.
After getting a taste of ZFS while trying out OpenSolaris Indiana under
VMware, I decided to give FreeBSD's ZFS implementation a try. Actually
before installing FreeBSD I tried a native OpenSolaris Indiana install
briefly, but ended up deciding it's new package system wasn't quite ready
for prime time yet.
Do I really need ZFS? Not really. But after getting a taste of ZFS it'd
be hard to go back to "regular" file systems.
I've had a couple of problems and I'm not sure if there ZFS related or
not.
When I switched my PC to FreeBSD this past Saturday I went by the article
located at:
http://www.ish.com.au/solutions/articles/freebsdzfs
to set up ZFS. I followed the article's loader.conf tweaks advice and
added:
vm.kmem_size_max="512M"
vm.kmem_size="512M"
vfs.zfs.zil_disable=1
to /boot/loader.conf.
All went well at first, then eventually I experienced my first hang. If I
remember correctly, I had an mp3 playing via mplayer and was moving a
large file from one ZFS "partition" to another. Both the mp3 player and
mv command appeared to hang. Checking top one of the processes was in a
zfs:lo state and the other was, I think, in a zfs:&b state, or something
similar. I forget which was which. Eventually they recovered.
Eventually I encountered a similar hang with similar symptoms. The second
hang might have eventually recovered on it's own but I finally resorted to
hitting the power switch. After a little Googling on the process states I
tried adding:
vfs.zfs.prefetch_disable="1"
to /boot/loader.conf. After doing so I gave ZFS a bit of a workout. I
shuffled some large files around, etc., and all appeared well.
When I went to bed this morning, I had to work graveyards last night, I
had an openoffice.org build running, which had been running for eight
hours or so. Okay, although I usually install everything from ports maybe
I should go with the binary package for OpenOffice. Anyway, when I got up
this afternoon my PC was completely locked up. I had no video signal,
caps lock and num lock wouldn't change the keyboard LEDs, etc. I finally
resorted to hitting the power button.
After getting things back up, I freebsd-updated to 7.0-RELEASE-p2, after
some Googling and commenting out the chflag calls in freebsd-update. I
know, I should have checked for updates right after I finished installing
FreeBSD.
Anyway, does the above hangs all sound like they're ZFS related. Are
there any other settings I should try? Is there a FreeBSD ZFS mailing
list? I searched but couldn't find one.
Kevin
http://www.RawFedDogs.net
http://www.WacoAgilityGroup.org
Bruceville, TX
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Longum iter est per praecepta, breve et efficax per exempla!!!
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