[NCLUG] ZFS RAID-Z2 for /home on Ubuntu 12.04

[Phil Marsh]

Hi,
My ZFS pools appear to be up and running.
I have a mirror (2 drives using a partition on each drive for the mirrorz pool) for some of / except /etc /dev /lib /home and a few of the other essential directories (minimum to allow booting prior to mounting the pools).
My /home is mounted on a RAIDZ2 four drive.
I am apparently getting really slow reads and writes - relative to standard mdadm mirrors and RAIDs. My CPU is a quad-core Intel from 2007 with 8GB 800MH DDR2 RAM.
Any ideas?
iostat -v shows < 20MB/sec and typically < 1MB/sec
Thanks,
Phil

Sent from my iPad

On Aug 28, 2013, at 1:52 PM, Michael Milligan <milli at acmeps.com> wrote:

> On 08/12/2013 10:06 AM, Sean Reifschneider wrote:
>> I have never run /home on ZFS, but I have no reason to expect it wouldn't
>> work.  I would use the zfs-on-linux version rather than the FUSE version if
>> I were starting today, but all my systems use FUSE because that is what I
>> had tested for my backups applications, predating the zfs-on-linux project.
>> 
>> I would probably set it up as a pool called "storage" or similar, and then
>> create a "home" ZFS under that pool, and set that up with a mountpoint of
>> /home.  It should get mounted on boot as part of the ZFS startup.
>> 
>> However, I haven't used the zfs-on-linux code, so there are likely some
>> details that I'm just not aware of here.  But the overall plan of using ZFS
>> for /home seems solid.
> 
> Just a data point to add, I switched to zfs-on-linux several years ago,
> and there were some bumps, but the 0.6.x code has been rock solid late
> last year and this.  Compiles on all kernels in Ubuntu up through 3.8.0
> with DKMS, no problems.  And it's significantly faster than the FUSE
> variant, though I did not do extensive benchmarking.
> 
> That said, I have /not/ trusted it with root (/) or even /home, so
> haven't tried that, but it should work fine at this point.  That was one
> of the bumps early on.
> 
> FWIW, the switch from FUSE was trivial, don't even have to "zpool
> upgade" the pools if you don't want, it will run with an older pool rev.
> 
> Another data point, I've been running Debian/kFreeBSD for a while too,
> rock solid with native ZFS pool and a mountpoint for root (/).
> 
> Regards,
> Mike
> 
> -- 
> Michael Milligan                                   -> milli at acmeps.com
> 
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