Category Archives: ZFS

Those who haven’t read about my 8.0-RC1 experience should do so first: Testing out FreeBSD 8.0-RC1 Basically, my experience with 8.0-RC2 was identical to that of RC1, except some of the bugs/issues I experienced are now gone (hooray!). Fixes/improvements which … Continue reading →

For many years now I’ve been dealing with an ongoing issue which still to this day has no real solution: classic UNIX mailboxes (called mbox) comparing the files’ mtime to its atime to determine if there’s new mail inside of … Continue reading →

EDIT: Those interested in the upcoming release of FreeBSD 8.0 should read both the below, as well as my Testing out FreeBSD 8.0-RC2 post (which notes that many, but not all, of these problems have been fixed). Yesterday I took … Continue reading →

There’s an “age old question” that has been floating around with regards to ZFS on FreeBSD — is it stable? “Stable” in this case means: do I risk losing my data, will it cause kernel panics or other oddities, and … Continue reading →

I just saw this commit come through for RELENG_7: The CVS commit log indicates this fixes a bug where NFS is being used on ZFS v13 exported filesystems, and the system mounting the NFS share attempts to open(2) with flags … Continue reading →

I’ve been trying to work out the source of “strange” performance-related issues when using ZFS on FreeBSD. The situation is reproducible, but not always, and it seems the complex inner nature of ZFS is probably contributing to the problem. The … Continue reading →

FreeBSD users should be aware of the massive rash of commits which have occurred over the past few weeks with regards to LOADER_ZFS_SUPPORT functionality. This functionality has been added, removed, tinkered with, re-added, removed, etc. numerous times. Proof is provided … Continue reading →

A follow-up to the following two posts of mine: FreeBSD and ZFS — horrible raidz1 speed FreeBSD and ZFS — horrible raidz1 speed — part 2 The problem I described has not recurred since enabling prefetch. So it seems whatever … Continue reading →

While debugging the aforementioned problem, I decided to try re-enabling ZFS’s prefetch capability as a test; “maybe things have greatly improved between v6 and v13″, I thought. Based on what I can tell so far (it’s only been 10-15 minutes, … Continue reading →

I’ve been noticing what appears to be absolutely horrible speeds from a ZFS raidz1 pool, but only in some circumstances — specifically, when mutt and header caching (for Maildir) is used. The setup is as follows: This indicates that /home … Continue reading →

EDIT: And just like I predicted, my blog is gradually beginning to see more and more hits from search engine queries for “force unmount is experimental” or “zfs force unmount”. I’ve talked to Kip about this. Below is the Email … Continue reading →

As mentioned in previous blog post, ZFS version 13 has been MFC’d to RELENG_7. Things looked great even after upgrading zpool and zfs metadata… until I shut down the machine (e.g. reboot, shutdown -p now, etc.). A message in similar … Continue reading →

Looks like Kip Macy just MFC’d ZFS version 13 to RELENG_7. The src/UPDATING message is: I’m not going to list off all the commits, but below is the commit message.

I may no longer participate in the FreeBSD Project, but I still follow commits to RELENG_7 daily. That said, I decided to see what recently had been happening on the mailing lists, and was surprised to see some threads discussing … Continue reading →