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The State of ZFS on Linux

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Re: The State of ZFS on Linux

#31

Post by khc »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #25

I've used ZoL since it was created, and zfs-fuse before that. I ran it on my workstation for a few years (managing a 4x750gb RAID-Z (= ZFS's RAID-5 impl), with ext3 on mdadm RAID 1 2x400gb root), and then swapped to BTRFS for 2x2TB BTRFS native RAID 1 (which was Oracle's ZFS competitor that seems to be largely abandoned although I see commits in the kernel changelog periodically), and now back to ZFS on a dedicated f…

And then how do you use this file server to take advantage of the RAID 0'ed SSD-like performance? Do you export it as NFS? iSCSI?

Re: The State of ZFS on Linux

#32

Post by DiabloD3 »

khc wrote: post #31
DiabloD3 wrote: post #25

I've used ZoL since it was created, and zfs-fuse before that. I ran it on my workstation for a few years (managing a 4x750gb RAID-Z (= ZFS's RAID-5 impl), with ext3 on mdadm RAID 1 2x400gb root), and then swapped to BTRFS for 2x2TB BTRFS native RAID 1 (which was Oracle's ZFS competitor that seems to be largely abandoned although I see commits in the kernel changelog periodically), and now back to ZFS on a dedicated f…

And then how do you use this file server to take advantage of the RAID 0'ed SSD-like performance? Do you export it as NFS? iSCSI?

It isn't solely a file server. I made it to take over Linux workstation duties from my workstation (which now runs Windows 8.1, which, tbh, really isn't nearly as bad as everyone says it is), and it runs VMs for clustered software testing and development.

I export /home and /tank via Samba[1] to the now-Windows workstation (and sshfs for my OSX running MBP, which I may transition to Samba now) and get about 85% of Gigabit in performance, which is good enough for purely file storage tasks, although I'm considering dropping in 10gbit into both machines via http://www.provantage.com/~7MLNX1KC.htm (the cheapest 10gbit cards I've seen that aren't used pulls on ebay) if I start making bigger test clusters that run on both my workstation and my server.

Workstation has 2x Crucial M500 960GB RAID 1 (was BTRFS RAID 1, now is Intel Matrix FakeRAID RAID 1 in Windows), for the record.

[1]: For each share: aio read size = 1, aio write size = 1, use sendfile = yes, min recievefile size = 1, socket options = SO_KEEPALKIVE TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_THROUGHPUT

Do not mess with SO_SNDBUF and SO_RECVBUF for socket options, the default seems to already be the maximum size allowable on Linux.

Re: The State of ZFS on Linux

#33

Post by foobarqux »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #25

I've used ZoL since it was created, and zfs-fuse before that. I ran it on my workstation for a few years (managing a 4x750gb RAID-Z (= ZFS's RAID-5 impl), with ext3 on mdadm RAID 1 2x400gb root), and then swapped to BTRFS for 2x2TB BTRFS native RAID 1 (which was Oracle's ZFS competitor that seems to be largely abandoned although I see commits in the kernel changelog periodically), and now back to ZFS on a dedicated f…

Can you speak more about why ZFS is better than BTRFS?

Re: The State of ZFS on Linux

#35

Post by ryao »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #25

I've used ZoL since it was created, and zfs-fuse before that. I ran it on my workstation for a few years (managing a 4x750gb RAID-Z (= ZFS's RAID-5 impl), with ext3 on mdadm RAID 1 2x400gb root), and then swapped to BTRFS for 2x2TB BTRFS native RAID 1 (which was Oracle's ZFS competitor that seems to be largely abandoned although I see commits in the kernel changelog periodically), and now back to ZFS on a dedicated f…

Debian is the last major Linux distribution where it is not easy to do / on ZFS. It might be possible to implement a module for Debian's initramfs generator in ZoL upstream. I suggest filing an issue to inquire about this possibility:

https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/issues/new

Re: The State of ZFS on Linux

#36

Post by WestCoastJustin »

For anyone interested, over the past couple weeks I have heavily researched ZFS, and created a couple screencasts about my findings [1, 2].

[1] https://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/35-zfs-on-linux-part-1-of...

[2] https://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/37-zfs-on-linux-part-2-of...

Re: The State of ZFS on Linux

#37

Post by nailer »

Putting production data on a driver maintained outside the mainline Linux kernel is a bad idea.

That isn't a licensing argument - I'm happy to use a proprietary nvidia.ko for gaming tasks, for example, because I won't be screwing up anyone's data if it breaks.

Re: The State of ZFS on Linux

#38

Post by blumentopf »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #32
khc wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then how do you use this file server to take advantage of the RAID 0'ed SSD-like performance? Do you export it as NFS? iSCSI?

It isn't solely a file server. I made it to take over Linux workstation duties from my workstation (which now runs Windows 8.1, which, tbh, really isn't nearly as bad as everyone says it is), and it runs VMs for clustered software testing and development. I export /home and /tank via Samba[1] to the now-Windows workstation (and sshfs for my OSX running MBP, which I may transition to Samba now) and get about 85% of Gi…

You need to tell the kernel if you need larger-than-default SO_SNDBUF/SO_RCVBUF, e.g. for 4 MByte (default is 128 kByte):

  sysctl -w net.core.rmem_max=4194304
  sysctl -w net.core.wmem_max=4194304
Documentation: http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-sta...

Re: The State of ZFS on Linux

#39

Post by ryao »

JeremyNT wrote: post #30
ryao wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can obtain the commands that you used to massage your sharenfs and sharesmb settings from `zpool history`. Please file issues with them in the issue tracker: https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/issues/new Please include information describing your distribution, the distribution release, your kernel version, the ZoL release and also the Samba version.

I guess I am curious about how this functionality is viewed more generally / philosophically and what state is considered to be in. I wonder whether it is perceived to be good enough for production use, and whether it's expected to work as smoothly as it does under Illumos. In my case I encountered situations where valid configurations from OI weren't supported in ZoL, but I remember coming to the conclusion that the…

The share support is one of the few things in ZoL that I do not actually use, so I cannot make a definitive statement on this topic. At present, the project does not have regression tests in the LLNL buildbot. The majority of the enabling work in this area was done by Turbo Fredriksson.

https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/commits?author=FransUrbo

I would emailing the zfs-discuss mailing list with Turbo on CC to ask:

http://zfsonlinux.org/lists.html https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/commits?author=FransUrbo

Additionally, I am aware of some SMB improvements by Turbo that are currently pending review. They are scheduled for inclusion into 0.6.4 provided that no issues are found during review:

https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/pull/1476

Re: The State of ZFS on Linux

#40

Post by DiabloD3 »

ryao wrote: post #35
DiabloD3 wrote: post #25

I've used ZoL since it was created, and zfs-fuse before that. I ran it on my workstation for a few years (managing a 4x750gb RAID-Z (= ZFS's RAID-5 impl), with ext3 on mdadm RAID 1 2x400gb root), and then swapped to BTRFS for 2x2TB BTRFS native RAID 1 (which was Oracle's ZFS competitor that seems to be largely abandoned although I see commits in the kernel changelog periodically), and now back to ZFS on a dedicated f…

Debian is the last major Linux distribution where it is not easy to do / on ZFS. It might be possible to implement a module for Debian's initramfs generator in ZoL upstream. I suggest filing an issue to inquire about this possibility: https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/issues/new

They have it for Ubuntu, but Ubuntu and Debian have somewhat diverged on how it is done. It is not a big issue for me on this build, but if I wanted to do large scale file servers and didn't want to stash a USB dongle in the box for root, it would be useful.

Although, I guess I could use FreeBSD if I didn't need KVM and/or Xen....

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