Re: kern/38717: sysinst shouldn't create LFS file systems

["Zafer Aydogan" <zafer%aydogan.de@localhost>]

2008/5/28 Andrew Doran <ad%netbsd.org@localhost>:
> On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 09:55:18PM +0200, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
>
>> On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 11:25:03PM +0000, Jeremy C. Reed wrote:
>> > The following reply was made to PR kern/38717; it has been noted by GNATS.
>> >
>> > From: "Jeremy C. Reed" <reed%reedmedia.net@localhost>
>> > To: gnats-bugs%NetBSD.org@localhost
>> > Cc:
>> > Subject: Re: kern/38717: sysinst shouldn't create LFS file systems
>> > Date: Mon, 26 May 2008 18:16:33 -0500 (CDT)
>> >
>> >  >  Both lfs and unionfs have come a long way, and are quite usable for 
>> > some.
>> >
>> >  I enabled LFS for the first time a few days ago. My system which had
>> >  around a 55+ day uptime, after a day became unstable and any process (it
>> >  seemed) that wrote to my other partition (not LFS) would hang. LFS
>> >  appeared to make my system unusable. I powercycled and newfs to FFS and
>> >  remounted and all is well.
>>
>> /usr/src on my home box has been lfs for several years now. I've not had
>> major problems with it.
>
> I have done a lot of stress testing on the file system code recently. Using
> a mixture of SGI fsstress, fsx, bonnie and postmark over different versions
> of NetBSD, my experience is that:
>
> - ffs, ext2fs, and tmpfs in -current /seem/ unbreakable
> - lfs and ffs+softdep can be broken within minutes
> - lfs in -current breaks within seconds
>
> Andrew
>

I've been using LFS since 3.99.21 times activley (yes, 3.x, not 4.x
:)). Mainly at home. But I also have two machines running lfs as their
root filesystem in a datacenter. My experience is that after 4.99.31
LFS code broke so much, that newer versions of current couldn't mount
the root lfs partition rw. The system dumps in ro only. This hasn't
changed until now. I would be happy, if lfs could be mounted rw again
(ps: i can provide more infos on that, or file a PR). Anyway, the
servers running lfs now have an uptime from 400 days. They are running
4.99.16. The odd thing is, that I can't update them, until the lfs
code has been fixed :(

Cheers, Zafer.