I had a FreeBSD server (FreeBSD 9.2 x64) that has been unable to scrub a zpool for more than a year, it would always hang at a certain point. When this happens, the system remains responsive (root is not on this zpool), but the pool and ZFS are frozen. The only recovery is a restart and a script that stops the scrub immediately after boot-up (otherwise, you get a lock-up loop). No entries in any log files can be found after such a crash.
Frankly, I assumed that this was due to aging hardware and too little RAM (4 GB RAM with an 8 TB RAID-Z2 pool). Also, the forum did not really show any comparable cases. However, when I set up a brand new server from scratch (FreeBSD 10.0 x64, 32 GB RAM, 24 TB RAID-Z2 pool), the issue started again, after the data was copied over. Long story short: after searching for days, I found that a few filenames on the zpool had a blank space (ASCII 0x20) as the first character of the filename. I am not sure if a filename starting with character 0x20 is technically illegal on FreeBSD, but renaming all files affected did solve the issue -
Now my question: has anybody experienced something similar or has some input here? I am considering to report this as a bug - IMHO, either such files should not be creatable or they should not cause a freeze of the pool.
Any feedback is appreciated!
Frankly, I assumed that this was due to aging hardware and too little RAM (4 GB RAM with an 8 TB RAID-Z2 pool). Also, the forum did not really show any comparable cases. However, when I set up a brand new server from scratch (FreeBSD 10.0 x64, 32 GB RAM, 24 TB RAID-Z2 pool), the issue started again, after the data was copied over. Long story short: after searching for days, I found that a few filenames on the zpool had a blank space (ASCII 0x20) as the first character of the filename. I am not sure if a filename starting with character 0x20 is technically illegal on FreeBSD, but renaming all files affected did solve the issue -
zpool scrub
now works. The bad filenames were likely introduced by Linux machines through NFS.Now my question: has anybody experienced something similar or has some input here? I am considering to report this as a bug - IMHO, either such files should not be creatable or they should not cause a freeze of the pool.
Any feedback is appreciated!