ZFS: It was going so well
ZFS is a very promising filesystem that Sun developed for SunOS. When they released the source code it got ported to Linux. A lot of people speak very highly of it, so I decided to give it a go before committing to use it in a real installation.
To start with, I just tried a simple zpool on a removable hard drive. I played with datasets, volumes and snapshots and it all worked really nicely. I even played around with having qemu mount volumes from it. I was hugely impressed.
Then I decided I wanted to unplug the drive. I did zpool export and it said it was busy. I closed everything I could find. I tried zfs unshare, zfs unmount, lsof and so on. No offenders showed up. I tried zpool export -f - still no joy.
At this point, /proc/mounts was showing no ZFS-related filing systems. /dev no longer contained the ZFS-volume-related devices. I could see no sign of the zpool except via ZFS's own commands, which were still stubbornly refusing to export the pool.
Eventually, I gave up and simply pulled the drive. Oh boy was ZFS unhappy! Now every zfs or zpool invocation wedged so hard not even kill -9 could terminate it.
I tried rmmod zfs without any real expectation it would deign to terminate; I was not disappointed.
Eventually, I rebooted. But ZFS seemed to have got in such a pickle that it didn't shut down cleanly. Cue an extremely painful reboot process.
This makes me sad. On the one hand, ZFS is a lovely filing system with a lot of potential; on the other, bricking a system so hard at such slight provocation is almost unforgivable. )-8
Cross-posted from this Dreamwidth original. If you can, please comment there instead.
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or Add Your Own.
To start with, I just tried a simple zpool on a removable hard drive. I played with datasets, volumes and snapshots and it all worked really nicely. I even played around with having qemu mount volumes from it. I was hugely impressed.
Then I decided I wanted to unplug the drive. I did zpool export and it said it was busy. I closed everything I could find. I tried zfs unshare, zfs unmount, lsof and so on. No offenders showed up. I tried zpool export -f - still no joy.
At this point, /proc/mounts was showing no ZFS-related filing systems. /dev no longer contained the ZFS-volume-related devices. I could see no sign of the zpool except via ZFS's own commands, which were still stubbornly refusing to export the pool.
Eventually, I gave up and simply pulled the drive. Oh boy was ZFS unhappy! Now every zfs or zpool invocation wedged so hard not even kill -9 could terminate it.
I tried rmmod zfs without any real expectation it would deign to terminate; I was not disappointed.
Eventually, I rebooted. But ZFS seemed to have got in such a pickle that it didn't shut down cleanly. Cue an extremely painful reboot process.
This makes me sad. On the one hand, ZFS is a lovely filing system with a lot of potential; on the other, bricking a system so hard at such slight provocation is almost unforgivable. )-8
Cross-posted from this Dreamwidth original. If you can, please comment there instead.
DW Comments: Read
or Add Your Own.