I've set up FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE on a 32bit Pentium (Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.06GHz, 2GB main mem) system with 2 IDE drives for system and SATA 4-port hostadapter (Promise PDC40718 SATA300 controller) with 4x1TB drives for data.
The 4x1TB shall be used in a redundant array. I read about ZFS and thought on comparing the performance with gvinum in an RAID5. I started with gvinum because I learned it does not impose high reqiurement on system ressources. I have some experiences with NetBSD RAIDframe and some more with linux mdadm.
Setting up the RAID5 with gvinum wasn't a big thing. I planned to do performance testing with bonnie++ with different stripe sizes.
The test couldn't be done successfully. bonnie++ stucks in waits for disk IO and is not killable. Eventually after some 24 to 72 hours a kill -TERM would stop bonnie. I then tried to umount the filesystem but now umount is stuck in bo_wwait for 10 days. Since I'm in the testing phase of FreeBSD I'm willing to let the system stay in that status. But since the umount is something file system related all IO is delayed as well. So, even access to the other disks is delayed.
To make things short: at the moment I would think, gvinum in RAID5 is not usable.
I read this post, but it is related to FreeBSD 9.1. https://forums.freebsd.org/posts/209372/
Therefore I was wondering if sometings has changed.
I will happily provide more hardware information.
Thanks.
The 4x1TB shall be used in a redundant array. I read about ZFS and thought on comparing the performance with gvinum in an RAID5. I started with gvinum because I learned it does not impose high reqiurement on system ressources. I have some experiences with NetBSD RAIDframe and some more with linux mdadm.
Setting up the RAID5 with gvinum wasn't a big thing. I planned to do performance testing with bonnie++ with different stripe sizes.
The test couldn't be done successfully. bonnie++ stucks in waits for disk IO and is not killable. Eventually after some 24 to 72 hours a kill -TERM would stop bonnie. I then tried to umount the filesystem but now umount is stuck in bo_wwait for 10 days. Since I'm in the testing phase of FreeBSD I'm willing to let the system stay in that status. But since the umount is something file system related all IO is delayed as well. So, even access to the other disks is delayed.
To make things short: at the moment I would think, gvinum in RAID5 is not usable.
I read this post, but it is related to FreeBSD 9.1. https://forums.freebsd.org/posts/209372/
Therefore I was wondering if sometings has changed.
I will happily provide more hardware information.
Thanks.