Re: When will ZFS become stable?

Kris Kennaway wrote:
> Maciej Suszko wrote:
> > Kris Kennaway wrote:
> >> Ivan Voras wrote:
> >>> On 06/01/2008, Peter Schuller <peter.schuller_at_infidyne.com> wrote:
> >>>>> This number is not so large. It seems to be easily crashed by
> >>>>> rsync, for example (speaking from my own experience, and also
> >>>>> some of my colleagues).
> >>>> I can definitely say this is not *generally* true, as I do a lot
> >>>> of rsyncing/rdiff-backup:ing and similar stuff (with many files /
> >>>> large files) on ZFS without any stability issues. Problems for me
> >>>> have been limited to 32bit and the memory exhaustion issue rather
> >>>> than "hard" issues.
> >>> It's not generally true since kmem problems with rsync are often
> >>> hard to repeat - I have them on one machine, but not on another,
> >>> similar machine. This nonrepeatability is also a part of the
> >>> problem.
> >>>
> >>>> But perhaps that's all you are referring to.
> >>> Mostly. I did have a ZFS crash with rsync that wasn't kmem
> >>> related, but only once.
> >> kmem problems are just tuning.  They are not indicative of
> >> stability problems in ZFS.  Please report any further non-kmem
> >> panics you experience.
> > 
> > I agree that ZFS is pretty stable itself. I use 32bit machine with
> > 2gigs od RAM and all hang cases are kmem related, but the fact is
> > that I haven't found any way of tuning to stop it crashing. When I
> > do some rsyncing, especially beetwen different pools - it hangs or
> > reboots - mostly on bigger files (i.e. rsyncing ports tree with
> > distfiles). At the moment I patched the kernel with
> > vm_kern.c.2.patch and it just stopped crashing, but from time to
> > time the machine looks like beeing freezed for a second or two,
> > after that it works normally. Have you got any similar experience?
> 
> That is expected.  That patch makes the system do more work to try
> and reclaim memory when it would previously have panicked from lack
> of memory.  However, the same advice applies as to Ivan: you should
> try and tune the memory parameters better to avoid this last-ditch
> sitation.

As Ivan said - tuning kmem_size only delay the moment system crash,
earlier or after it happens - that's my point of view.

> P.S. It sounds like you do not have sufficient debugging configured 
> either: crashes should produce either a DDB prompt or a coredump so
> they can be studied and understood.

You're right - I turned debugging off, because it's not a production
machine and I can afford such behaviour. Right now, using kernel with
kmem patch applied it's ,,usable''.
-- 
regards, Maciej Suszko.