filesystem discussion

T

trybeingarun

Hi,
I am purchasing new hardware for my desktop next week, intel core-i5 661 processor, Gigabyte ga-h55-usb3 motherboard, 2*2 GB Corsair 1333 MHz Xms Ram and am installing freebsd 8.1 in it. (I know that the GPU unit in the processor won't get detected, but I am okay with it).

Since I have never used ZFS before I thought to I could try that. I find the following pdf very good and am reading it.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CBsQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdlc.sun.com%2Fpdf%2F819-5461%2F819-5461.pdf&ei=8mtMTMv3MIWXrAeMn5C5Dg&usg=AFQjCNGRs5FJEaj9r2r9SfdWhGsPqJQ27Q

Many websites that I browsed through gave me the feeling that for a desktop (typically used for watching video, some programming and stuff) ZFS is an overkill. I would like to have you guys' opinion on it and also what FS you people use and for what purpose.
 
No... I'm strictly for zfs only systems :D
[I use it on desktop and server]

[Ufs snapshots are OK, but they are too limited]
 
If you did not have time to setup/learn zfs you
might try gjournal. I set a few up for backup
after obliterating a gmirror on purpose (the error
messages were too terse for my liking). [Information
probably useful more to others reading the thread than
the OP].
 
Hmm, as far as the future goes, ZFS might be the way to go. You'll not do wrong by learning something in any case (lemon party excepted).

You should definitely throw as much RAM as you can afford at it.
 
A 64-bit, 4 GB RAM system is perfect for ZFS. You don't need to tune a 64-bit ZFS system with 4 GB of RAM, although you may want to depending on your workload (strictly desktop, no file serving? nothing to worry about).

With that amount of CPU, you can enable lzjb or even gzip compression on some filesystems (/var, /tmp, /usr/ports, /usr/src, and the like).

ZFS boot support in 8.x is much improved, as you can now boot off a pool made up of raidz vdevs (in addition to non-redundant pool and mirror vdev support).

However, the deciding factor is the number of drives in your system. If you only have 1 disk, there's not much point to using ZFS.

If you only have 2 drives, you can use ZFS with a single mirror vdev. But you'll get better performance out of using gmirror(8) and Soft-Update w/Journalling.

If you have more than 2 drives, then ZFS would be better. Either multiple mirror vdevs, or raidz vdevs would be best.
 
I am currently planning to install 32 bit version of FreeBSD because I think it would be more stable and flash might work well. I tried 64 bit version of ubuntu 10.04 and am not fully satisfied. Is it okay to extrapolate my experience with 64 bit ubuntu to Freebsd or am I generalizing things?

In short with the h/w I have specified, for a desktop system and for ZFS should I go for 64-bit FBSD or stick with 32?
 
For a ZFS system, regardless of use (laptop, desktop, server, etc), you really want to run the 64-bit version of FreeBSD.

If you have more than 3 GB of RAM in a machine, regardless of its use, you really want to run the 64-bit version of FreeBSD.

That being said, I don't currently have access to any 64-bit capable desktop machines at home (P3s and P4 here) so I'm still running 32-bit FreeBSD. I'll leave it up to others to chime in on what may not work well on a 64-bit FreeBSD desktop.
 
32 vs 64-bit
Since Nvidia released their native 64-bit driver I see no reason why you shouldn't run amd64.

zfs vs ufs
For a single-disk desktop there's hardly anything to gain by using zfs, apart from the fun of playing with it. zfs is more complex, and probably a bit slower in this setting (checksum calculation)
 
zfs + 32bit is perfectly fine.... I'm using it on desktop
zfs + single HDD is perfectly fine as well [ snapshots, rollback, clones, copies=2 or 3 on /home ]
 
I've been running 64-bit on this laptop since early 2009. The few things that give trouble can be pretty easily found here and worked around (wine, flash, nvidia drivers), but the normal stuff like browsers, gimp, openoffice, virtualbox all work pretty flawlessly.
 
It really comes down to deciding what your needs are and picking the filesystem that will fill those needs. Personally, I find the extra features of ZFS a non-starter for my workload compared to the well established maturity of UFS. But then again, I don't need the features that ZFS gives you. I would generally argue that ZFS on a single disk really makes you miss out on a lot of what ZFS is about (RAID, disk management).

Here's a quote from the ZFS page (http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+zfs/whatis):
ZFS is a new kind of file system that provides simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability. ZFS is not an incremental improvement to existing technology; it is a fundamentally new approach to data management. We've blown away 20 years of obsolete assumptions, eliminated complexity at the source, and created a storage system that's actually a pleasure to use.
Click to expand...

Note: bold is mine

I see statements like that and I don't think of it as getting rid of old assumptions, I think of it as forgetting 20 years of history. Remember, rewriting something from scratch gives opportunity to introduce a whole different level of bugs. Especially when you do things like taking "fundamental new approaches."

Anyway, I thought someone should give the opposite viewpoint. Don't get me wrong, I think having ZFS in FreeBSD is great for the community, but as with all things, there is a correct tool for a given job. Assess the job and pick the correct tool. If the feature set of UFS is sufficient for your workload, go with it; it's well established and has 20 years of reliable history backing it up.
 
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