Re: When will ZFS become stable?

Ivan Voras <ivoras_at_freebsd.org> writes:
> As far as I know about the details of implementation and what would it
> take to fix the problems, is it safe to assume ZFS will never become
> stable during 7.x lifetime?

Have you heard of the logical fallacy called "plurium interrogationum"?
You may not be familiar with the phrase (which is Latin for "multiple
questions"), but it's what you're doing here: asking a question which is
impossible to answer truthfully because it is based on an incorrect
premise, and to answer the question correctly you must first discuss the
premise.  It's a favorite Hollywood plot device, because you can have
the smart-aleck lawyer interrupt the confused witness and insist on a
yes or no answer, forcing the witness to implicitly agree with the
premise.  I doubt it would work in a real-life court, though, because
judges tend to be smart people.  But I digress.

Your question is based on the premise that ZFS in FreeBSD 7 is unstable.
That premise is false.  There are issues with auto-tuning of certain
parameters, which can cause kmem exhaustion, but they are easily worked
around by setting a few tunables.  It has worked very well for me
(raidz, 1.2 TB pool, 4 GB RAM, ~60 file systems and twice as many
snapshots) after I added the following lines to loader.conf:

vm.kmem_size="1G"
vfs.zfs.arc_min="64M"
vfs.zfs.arc_max="512M"

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des_at_des.no