Re: When will ZFS become stable?

> >> Last I heard, rsync didn't crash Solaris on ZFS :)
> >
> > [Citation needed]
>
> I can't provide citation about a thing that doesn't happen - you don't
> hear things like "oh and yesterday I ran rsync on my Solaris with ZFS
> and *it didn't crash*!" often.
>
> But, with some grains of salt taken, consider this Google results:
>
> * searching for "rsync crash solaris zfs": 790 results, most of them
> obviously irrelevant
> * searching for "rsync crash freebsd zfs": 10,800 results; a small
> number of the results is from this thread, some are duplicates, but it's
> a large number in any case.
>
> I feel that the number of Solaris+ZFS installations worldwide is larger
> than that of FreeBSD+ZFS and they've had ZFS longer.

I used zfs on FreeBSD current amd64 around summer 2006 as a
samba-server for internal use on a dual xeon (first generation 64-bit,
somewhat slow and hot) with 4 GB ram and two qlogic hba's attached to
approx. 8 TB of storage. I did not once experience any kernel panic or
other unplanned stop. But I whenever I manually mounted a smbfs-share
the terminal would not return to the command line.

I upgraded in october 2007 and the smbfs-mount returned to the command
line and I thought I was happy. Until I started to get the kmem_map
too small kernel-panics when doing much I/O (syncing 40 GB of small
files). I tuned the values as indicated in the zfs tuning guide and
rebooted and increased the values as the kernel panics persisted. When
I increased the values even more I ended up with a kernel which
refused to boot, boy I was almost getting a panic myself :-)

Applying Pawel's patch did make the server survive two or three 40 GB
rsyncing so the patch did help. But we were approching xmas season
which is a very critical time for us so I migrated to solaris 10. The
solaris server has had no downtime but to conclude that  solaris is
more stable in my situation is premature.

-- 
regards
Claus

When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom,
the gentlest gamester is the soonest winner.

Shakespeare