Re: ZFS & NFS integration...

Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:
> Darren Reed <darrenr_at_freebsd.org> writes:
>> Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:
>>> Darren Reed <darrenr_at_freebsd.org> writes:
>>>> Whats the planned status for ZFS+NFS with 7.0?
>>> Don't Do It, basically.
>> This sounds like a "shoot yourself in the foot" comment.
>>
>> Why?
> 
> I haven't figured out the exact details yet, but apparently when the
> client closes a file that was opened read / write, the server stops
> responding to that client.

I've been operating a file server (P3/733, 512MB) that way for many
months. Besides the problems with Samba on ZFS (one of the clients
is a DVB-T receiver that reads/writes to SMB shares) there have never
been problems. Other clients use NFS (and there exists an unsupported
hack that makes the DVB-T receiver use NFS instead of SMB, which I
installed to work around the Samba issue, which means that this client
now also uses NFS). I use another machine to cut and clean recordings
and while the P3 only has an fxp adapter (i.e. 100baseTX), I often
max out this link for significant durations (hours at a time). The
server seems to run as long as I let it (at least months, since I have
upgraded it a few times since ZFS went into the tree).

Since my applications/uses include R/W access to files via NFS, I can
say that it at least can work reliably.

That does not mean, that there can not be problems with NFS to ZFS
based files, but there are real world uses that just work. In my case,
there is little concurrent access to the NFS server (occasionally I
record one or two video streams and watch a third one over the DVB-T box
or another client, but there are hardly ever more than two NFS clients
at a time).

ZFS as a whole has rough edges (especially since the auto-tuning of
kernel parameters does not account for it, yet).

Regards, STefan