ZFS, anyone?

[Freston]

I was just curious. I did a search here on the forums, and all I found about ZFS where two ancient threads. Too old to bring back to life, although I tried (sorry 'bout that )


No, it's not really a question. I'm just curious if other people are using it, and what their experiences are. So far I've not seen great benefits for plain old desktops or something. But that hasn't ever stopped a geek, now has it?

[Lakshmipathi]

AFAIK, Linux don't support ZFS ..oops sorry..ZFS won't support Linux I think there was fuse based file system called "zfs-fuse" to port ZFS to linux - But sadly it's development activities almost stopped. ZFS on FUSE/Linux

Last month , I was testing solaris 10 - ZFS was the default file system. I think brtfs will be Linux's answer to ZFS.

[Freston]

Yeah, there's a licensing incompatibility, but the development of zfs-fuse hasn't stopped, it's here

Last month , I was testing solaris 10 - ZFS was the default file system.

Heh, yeah, I came to the subject through playing with openSolaris. My possible maybe future employer wants me to have an opinion on Solaris. And I was pretty impressed with ZFS. So I installed that on my Linux machine (or rather, I installed zfs-fuse).


I think zfs or zfs-fuse for that matter, might have bigger advantages on a large scale fully redundant mega big enterprise system, rather than on my old and fully non-redundant lappy but still, I was kind of surprised not finding anything on the subject here. I know it's not mainstream, but there are distros that have it in their repos.

[HROAdmin26]

ZFS's performance on Linux suffers (on larger setups and under load) due to being implemented through Fuse.

Due to licensing issues (and that will be worse now due to Oracle), I don't see this ever being fully available on Linux. For this reason, I don't think any enterprise shops are seriously considering ZFS outside of Solaris.

[Lakshmipathi]

Yeah, there's a licensing incompatibility, but the development of zfs-fuse hasn't stopped, it's here

oh..yes seems like dev. activities still going on !!

Heh, yeah, I came to the subject through playing with openSolaris. My possible maybe future employer wants me to have an opinion on Solaris. And I was pretty impressed with ZFS. So I installed that on my Linux machine (or rather, I installed zfs-fuse).


I think zfs or zfs-fuse for that matter, might have bigger advantages on a large scale fully redundant mega big enterprise system, rather than on my old and fully non-redundant lappy but still, I was kind of surprised not finding anything on the subject here. I know it's not mainstream, but there are distros that have it in their repos.

I have tried to install Zfs on my opensolaris vm and played with it. I'm also impressed with their "the last word in file system" theme. I have installed zfs-fuse on linux - yet to explore it.
Installing zfs-fuse on linux lappy and learning about its basic commands will be helpful - especially if you are going to work with solaris in future, though ZFS primarily aimed at large storage.

ZFS's performance on Linux suffers (on larger setups and under load) due to being implemented through Fuse.

Due to licensing issues (and that will be worse now due to Oracle), I don't see this ever being fully available on Linux. For this reason, I don't think any enterprise shops are seriously considering ZFS outside of Solaris.

file system based on fuse will always have poor performance , but fuse allows us to have virtually all kinds of file systems on linux.

Thanks to ZFS ..solaris will survive bit more longer !!!

[Freston]

Well, actually, I should be a little angry at you HROAdmin26 For making me spend the entire evening running 'benchmarks' at this zfs-fuse thing. Heh, I now know what you mean about lacking performance. Although from zfs-fuse to zfs-fuse copying and deleting files on zfs-fuse isn't bad at all. But importing files and creating files is rather slow. Half as slow as other filesystems (I compared zfs-fuse with feiser, ext3 and jfs).


So it may not be a very good solution for high performance enterprise. But to have ZFS compatibility on Linux, and to be able to try it out without enduring the Solaris hardware incompatibilities with my lappy is pretty good

I have tried to install Zfs on my opensolaris vm and played with it. I'm also impressed with their "the last word in file system" theme. I have installed zfs-fuse on linux - yet to explore it.
Installing zfs-fuse on linux lappy and learning about its basic commands will be helpful - especially if you are going to work with solaris in future, though ZFS primarily aimed at large storage.

I think it's always a good thing to add to the list of stuff you're familiar with. But for me personally, it may be close at hand. Although this maybe new future employer is mighty vague. Ah, nevermind.

And the list of features is endless, endless... Takes some time to get to know it. But it's been pretty cool so far.

[HROAdmin26]

I am not sure if the most recent openSolaris ZFS has the dedupe option available, but I have patched to dev versions just to test it out. I'd recommend playing with that as well.

ZFS's most interesting features:
1) Compression
2) Dedupe
3) Configurable hashing algorithms

If you're moving into the enterprise space with Solaris and filesystems, another one to consider getting familiar with is Storage Foundation (VxFS, Veritas Volume Manager.) You can download a free version called Storage Foundation Basic.

* Using Solaris on X86 HW is like running an engine with a few cylinders missing/misfiring. Openboot PROM is far more advanced than any BIOS and a real advantage for Sparc systems.

[Freston]

ZFS's most interesting features:
1) Compression
2) Dedupe
3) Configurable hashing algorithms

Yeah, I read about those hashing algorithms, but they didn't seem interesting to me. I read so far as to see that it can be done on the fly. But I couldn't picture a scenario where you'd want to.

If you're moving into the enterprise space with Solaris and filesystems, another one to consider getting familiar with is Storage Foundation (VxFS, Veritas Volume Manager.) You can download a free version called Storage Foundation Basic.

Thanks! I'll look into that.

[Lakshmipathi]

great to hear you have done some performance testing (which is my job )
If you haven't checked this earlier - check this for comparison Comparison of file systems - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Freston]

great to hear you have done some performance testing (which is my job )

Hey colleague!


Well, performance testing, I guess that's true in a sense. Actually what I did was I divided a drive in four equal partitions with these filesystems: rieser, etx3, jfs and zfs-fuse.

I then used dd to create huge (4GB) files on them, copied these files and deleted them.
Then I created tens of thousands of small files on the filesystems, copied those around and deleted them.

And I timed each step. But since we're on the subject, I am curious. Is this methodology any use for comparing filesystem performance?

#!/bin/bash                                                                                                                             

COUNT1="0"                          
NRSMALLFILES="10000"                

# These arrays correlate in COUNT1
PARTITION=(     hdb1              
                hdb2              
                hdb3              
                hdb4              
          )                       

FILESYSTEM=(    reiser 
                ext3   
                jfs    
                zfs    
           )           


# Don't run this at home!
exit

#########################
BigZero () {             

echo ""
echo "##############################################"
echo "Testing on ${PARTITION[$COUNT1]} formatted ${FILESYSTEM[$COUNT1]}"
echo ""                                                                 
echo "Create bigfile on ${FILESYSTEM[$COUNT1]}"                         
        dd      bs=4M \                                                 
                count=1000 \                                            
                if=/dev/zero \                                          
                of=/mnt/$dir/bigfile                                    
echo ""                                                                 
echo "Copy bigfile on ${FILESYSTEM[$COUNT1]}"                           
        time cp         /mnt/$dir/bigfile \                             
                        /mnt/$dir/copiedbigfile                         

echo ""
echo "Delete big files on ${PARTITION[$COUNT1]} formatted ${FILESYSTEM[$COUNT1]}"
        time rm         /mnt/$dir/{bigfile,copiedbigfile}                        

}



#########################
CreateSmallFiles () {    
COUNT2="0"               
mkdir /mnt/$dir/dirwithsmallfiles
echo -n "Creating $NRSMALLFILES small files "

while [ $COUNT2 -lt $NRSMALLFILES ] ; do
        dd      bs=512 \                
                count=1 \               
                if=/dev/zero \          
                of=/mnt/$dir/smallfile$COUNT2 \
                2> /dev/null                   
        ((COUNT2++))                           
done                                           

}



#########################
CopyAndCleanup () {      

echo ""
echo "done... now copying small files"
        time cp         /mnt/$dir/smallfile* \
                        /mnt/$dir/dirwithsmallfiles

echo ""
echo "Cleaning up!"
echo -n "Deleting small files takes: "
        time rm         /mnt/$dir/smallfile*

echo ""
echo -n "Deleting whole directory with small files takes: "
        time rm -rf     /mnt/$dir/dirwithsmallfiles


}




#########################
#
#    Work work work...
#
#########################
for dir in ${PARTITION[*]} ; do

        BigZero
        time CreateSmallFiles
        CopyAndCleanup

# Increment count for dir and arrays
((COUNT1++))

done