Re: state or future of LFS?

[gilbert.fernandes%orange.fr@localhost]

Under Wasabi, a journaled NetBSD file system has been developped. Recently, 
Wasabi gave the code for that journalized FFS to the project, which you will be 
able to find by browsing the NetBSD news.

LFS is probably gonna be replaced by this work under Wasabi patronage. Code is 
robust, clean, and I have moved my home farm for storage under netbsd beta 
where it was first available. Works as fine as LFS and does not panic like LFS 
does when free space on filesystem is close to none (close to none for users, 
as some are reserved for root).

I would suggest you to either wait for netbsd-5 or if you are as eager as me, 
to install the netbsd beta to become 5 so you can have your FFS journalized 
right now.

Go to the netbsd site. Upper right click on the link for news archives. Select 
2009 and scroll to february 2009 and read the paragraph about softdep: more 
reliable, better performance and it comes from Wasabi: they developed it for 
their own use or for a client, and after some time (and use, so we know it is 
something that has seen and does see real world use) they generously 
contributed back to the project.

At home, i Have a closet with several machines, all under netbsd-beta to be 5.0 
with a total amount close to 4 terabyte. Each machine has from 2 to 4 disks, 
all under netbsd FFS journaled, and the 4 terabyte has about 30 gb free. I have 
been using for huge volumes of data this code, each piece being backuped at 
least twice on different machines, and in the last two weeks i have cleaned and 
moved from machine to machine several terabytes. No error, no crash, no 
problem. The oldest machine is a shuttle ss51g with a pentium 4, i also have a 
soekris 4501, several amd64 on 586 and 686, and a modern 4-core amd64 with a 
lot of disks. Several archs, lots of data, moved tons of them between disks and 
archs and no problem, and I use this journaled stuff since 3 monthes ;)
-----Original Message-----
From: Niels Dettenbach <nd%syndicat.com@localhost>

Date: Fri, 10 Apr 2009 14:18:00 
To: <current-users%netbsd.org@localhost>
Cc: <netbsd-users%netbsd.org@localhost>
Subject: state or future of LFS?


Dear List readers and netbsd devels,


what is the current usability state of the LFS (Log-structured File System)? 

Is it ready for productional use or still to understand as under development? 
Is there any active roadmap? 

Did someone have practical experiences (stability, performance, handling...) 
with LFS within productive environments? Are there any other interesting 
alternatives under NetBSD? 

Did someone played or worked with other filesystem alternatives for large hard 
disks (i.e. some cluster FS's a.o.) then the default FFS with interesting 
results?

I'm using NetBSD 4.0 and 4.99.73 (and sometimes other *BSD's) for different 
productive internet servers (i.e. email servers) - under xen and wo - on SAS 
based disk RAID's (10 and 5)  and my idea is to use / switch over to a LSF 
for my larger email-storages. 

My main target's are:
 - fast recovery (i.e. after a crash / power disruption)
 - fast file access (i.e. mail space under cyrus imap)
 - minimized data losses after crash or medium failures

There are different infos about the roadmap and the current state of LFS 
around in the net - like here:
        ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-4.0/CHANGES-4.0
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log-structured_File_System_(BSD)
or here
        http://wiki.netbsd.se/How_to_install_a_server_with_a_root_lfs_partition

many thanks for any hint o tip in this issue and - for you all here -
have a nice easter-weekend,


Niels.

-- 

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