7 Oct
2012
7 Oct
'12
12:57 p.m.
On 10/7/2012 10:36 AM, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 10/07/2012 01:00 PM, Toby Thain wrote:
The choice for systems with resources make sense, but for smaller
systems I've had memory problems with ZFS blowing the system up. For
instance a freenas system with 512mb pigs out with ZFS and won't support
the file system.
This system is a fully embedded linux, in that it boots to linux from
flash, then installs an "operating" linux on the hard drives with full
operational features after initialization. There is nothing odd about
the build other than it is a bit old kernel wise now.
I don't know if they had ZFS as an open source embedded option when they
first made the system. The system is from Infarant and the main bit
of technology they had was a single chip system with 4 sata ports, and 2
1gb network ports and a 32bit sparc on a chip. The original selling
method was to get a mini-itx box and the original board they made which
is what is in the readynas-1000s now could be dropped in.
So their design decision didn't include ZFS unless it was there and
stable in 2007, which I don't think it was.
The main tradeoff is that they used a 16k block size to fit the sparc /
linux file system driver quirk of needing disk block size to match the
system paging block size. you have to use a special efs3 driver to get
to the drives on an Intel system.
The nice thing is that there isn't anything but Linux to tempt them to
be non standard, though they have a pretty nice and complicated raid
management driver system in their operational firmware. They put efs3
boot images for the operational firmware on a partition on every drive
for quick booting once you initialize the drives, so if a drive fails,
they still get to the operational firmware faster than whatever they
have it in their onboard flash.
The main reason for the posting was the fact that this enhanced driver
scans the media and hangs prior to going "live" and responding to their
admin pages, or making their services and access to data "live" which
makes it a brick. That makes my question about older systems which
could deal with disk drives growing real errors and continuing to work
to the group here my main topic.
thanks for the ZFS suggestion though.
Jim
Have you looked into the integrity-by-design of
ZFS? (Sadly now owned by
Oracle, but forked as open source.)
Seconded. I'm now to the point where I
grumble if I have to bother
with a system NOT running ZFS. I even use it on my desktop machine.
-Dave