ZFS FreeBSD 11 ZFS issues, are they a problem in R12?

Hi,

I was reading the errata for 11 and 12. It looks like there are some serious issues with ZFS in R11 but the R12 errata does not include any ZFS issues.

Is it the case that those issues including the "no work around" for R11 do not exist in R12, because they were fixed in code, or have they just not happened/been reported in R12?

Does anybody know?

Thanks,

Joe
 
It looks like there are some serious issues with ZFS in R11
What issues are you talking about?
Is it the case that those issues including the "no work around" for R11 do not exist in R12, because they were fixed in code, or have they just not happened/been reported in R12?
Can't tell if I don't know which issues you're talking about.
 
What issues are you talking about?

Can't tell if I don't know which issues you're talking about.

Sorry, and thanks for not blasting me. I thought about posting links but some of you guys are so on top of things I figured maybe posting links would be worse than not! What to do, what to do!?

Ok, so here for 11.2 https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.2R/errata.html under 4. Open issues there are some fairly serious ZFS bugs mentioned, one that results in an unbootable system and has no workaround.

But here for 12.0 RELEASE https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.0R/errata.html these bugs are not mentioned at all.
 
Ok, so here for 11.2 https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.2R/errata.html under 4. Open issues there are some fairly serious ZFS bugs mentioned, one that results in an unbootable system and has no workaround.
I only see two ZFS related issues mentioned. One is specific to i386 and the other is specific to ARM64. ARM64 is a Tier 2 architecture and i386 shouldn't be used if you're serious about ZFS.

There's a third issue mentioned but that would only present itself with a custom kernel that lacks the NFS kernel option. GENERIC has this option by default.

But here for 12.0 RELEASE https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.0R/errata.html these bugs are not mentioned at all.
It's a list of known issues, if the previous 11.x bugs aren't mentioned then they're either not an issue any more or it's not known to be an issue.
 
And to further expand: The first issue (the i386 one) does not endanger the data stored on ZFS, only creates a little bit of hassle when booting the first time after the issue is discovered. It should not even matter to a responsible system administrator, since they should have read the errata in the first place, and added the loader.conf line when installing. By the way, in my humble opinion ZFS works fine on i386, as long as you are talking about a small system with reasonable capacity (handful of TB), and you don't turn on dedup or compression.

The second issue only affects arm64, which is not only second tier, but not used by many people (Arm servers never became popular, for better or for worse). And there is an easy workaround for a responsible sys admin: don't use ZFS on root when installing on arm64, done.

I think the important message is really this: The OP seems to be scared by errata. The gist of his message is: "there are errata about ZFS in 11, therefore I don't want to run 11". That's exactly backwards. Knowledge is power. He should run 11, because there all the known problems are publicly visible, and a skilled and responsible sys admin can plan accordingly. Personally, I'm more scared of running FreeBSD version 12, because there I don't know the problems (yet). Matter-of-fact, my server at home is still on version 11, and will remain there for another few months. Remember: Pioneers are the people with arrows in them! There is a nice German motto for this: "Hannemann, geh Du voran": If there is something dangerous or unpleasant to do send someone else.
 
Personally, I'm more scared of running FreeBSD version 12, because there I don't know the problems (yet).
A couple of servers at home run 12-STABLE. I've ran into a couple of issues, nothing earth shattering but still a few things that need to be ironed out. None of the issues are related to ZFS though, most of my issues are with third party software (Puppet server, Zabbix, etc) that's not yet aware of certain changes and need to be updated upstream. For production systems at my client I'm still sticking to 11.2, I rarely put .0 versions in production.

Remember: Pioneers are the people with arrows in them!
Yep. I don't mind the arrows, I'm happy to help with bug tracking and testing. My other servers need to work when I need them and therefor still run 11.2, so no fact-finding or testing happening there :D
 
Just to point out ERRATA's are "fixed" issues. So they would only actually be a problem when using the release without any patches which no one should be doing. Either STABLE, CURRENT, or Release+patches would have these fixed.
 
Just to point out ERRATA's are "fixed" issues. So they would only actually be a problem when using the release without any patches which no one should be doing. Either STABLE, CURRENT, or Release+patches would have these fixed.

Thanks, I was not clear whether the errata were notifications of known problems or were problems that were fixed.

In the last week or so I brought up a 16T server box with FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE and then a couple of days later updated to 12.1. It is running superbly, with OpenBSD's httpd, minidlna, and Samba. I couldn't be happier with it. One of the things I like to see on a server is when is idle that the CPUs are doing nothing, that few processes are running, and that memory utilization is low. OpenBSD and FreeBSD idle beautifully. I did have to tweak ZFS ARC because it was kinda eating all my RAM (I have only 8GB on this box, need to buy another stick) but after setting it to 4G things are running perfectly.

I did the pkg audit and a problem with Samba was reported. I tried to see if any patches were available and nothing was downloaded. How do I know when it's fixed and how do I get the fix for package vulns? Does freebsd-update fetch/install only deal with vulns in base, or are packages patched this way also?
 
Thank you SirDice. This is helpful info.

Unfortunately Samba410 has not yet been updated if I'm doing it correctly (pkg upgrade).
 
Keep an eye on the port, it's always going to get patched there first. If it's a security issue it should get patched in the quarterly branch too. Then it's going to take a bit of time for all the build servers to create the packages.

But I just checked my net/samba410 and I don't get hits with pkg-audit(8). Which issues are being reported?
 
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