[OpenIndiana-discuss] sd.conf trouble and illumos bug #3220

Tue Feb 4 16:52:50 UTC 2014

I'm having the same problem.   What I can't seem to find is the correct
syntax for using a wildcard in sd.conf.   Can you provide an example?

Thanks!
-Chip

On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 1:55 PM, Bryan N Iotti
<ironsides.medvet at runbox.com>wrote:

> Adding a wildcard for the all devices to use the 4K block size did indeed
> work and drastically improved the performance (and, I guess, life
> expectancy) of that SSD.
>
> I also added "physical-block-size=512" entries for all traditional
> 512-byte block disks connected to this machine and they are running fine.
>
> The scrub speed on the SSD (only quick test I could think of to try
> sustained read and write) went from 160MB/sec to 250MB/sec. If I use 8K it
> doesn't change as much, but seems to be more constant. System has been
> running for a couple of hours and it's nice and snappy.
>
> Should I add a line to the OI wiki about the wildcard options? I didn't
> see them there last time I looked and they can be handy for newcomers and
> the like.
>
> Bryan
>
> On Mon, 6 Jan 2014 12:49:53 -0800 (PST)
> Reginald Beardsley <pulaskite at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > Sadly yahoo mail makes a mess of replies embedded in the text :-(
> >
> > I'll have to try the 3 TB USB drive again.  I certainly can't see any
> reason that your wildcarding scheme shouldn't work.  If there is a problem
> it's probably a bug.
> >
> > There are so many lies being told about geometry that it's hard to say
> what you should do.  At one point I wound up with a partition that was not
> 4k aligned if I started with cylinder #1, so I used #2 which was 4k
> aligned.  However, the 2k aligned partition seemed to work OK, so I'm not
> certain.  I wasn't willing to leave it that way to avoid wasting a little
> space.
> >
> > I can't think of any reason that 512B drives wouldn't work fine aligned
> to larger boundaries.   The only consequence I can see is some wasted space
> which really isn't an issue given we're talking pennies per GB.  I can't
> imagine a performance issue that could result.
> >
> > It seems to me that the default alignment rules would give less trouble
> if the alignment was to the most restrictive requirement.
> >
> > --------------------------------------------
> > On Mon, 1/6/14, Bryan N Iotti <ironsides.medvet at runbox.com> wrote:
> >
> >  Subject: Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] sd.conf trouble and illumos bug #3220
> >  To: openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org
> >  Date: Monday, January 6, 2014, 12:08 PM
> >
> >  Hi Reginald,
> >
> >  Thanks for your reply.
> >
> >  In the end, I just booted from a live DVD and plugged that
> >  drive in on my laptop using a double asterisk as the sd.conf
> >  line and an 8k block size. A test pool create read back
> >  ashift=13, which should be fine.
> >
> >  Then I used format -e and fdisk to create a single Solaris
> >  slice with start and end blocks that would fall on a
> >  cylinder number that was divisible by 8 (I did it like for
> >  4K disks, if I'm wrong I'd like some input on that please).
> >
> >  Then I created the rpool in the first slice and moved the
> >  disk over to the final system, where I sent and received the
> >  zfs datasets. Change menu.lst, install grub and I was done.
> >  Working fine so far (160MB/sec sustained on a scrub, normal
> >  wsvc_time and asvc_time in iostat).
> >
> >  Would anyone see any problem in doing the sd.conf line
> >  backwards, I mean masking all drives as "**" with a 4K
> >  blocksize and adding entries for the other 512-byte drives?
> >  What would happen if ZFS thought a 512-byte block device
> >  used a 4K block size? Wasted space, performance issue,
> >  errors?
> >
> >  Thanks, as always, for any and all input.
> >
> >
> >     Bryan
> >
> >
> >  On Sun, 5 Jan 2014 16:10:58 -0800 (PST)
> >  Reginald Beardsley <pulaskite at yahoo.com>
> >  wrote:
> >
> >  > I can't comment on your particular issue which is why I
> >  didn't respond earlier.  However,  I had trouble
> >  getting a 3 TB Toshiba USB drive to work properly.  I
> >  spent a bunch of time reading the code that parses sd.conf,
> >  but finally gave up and didn't go further.
> >  >
> >  > On reflection I wonder if the problem is a failure to
> >  propagate the information about block size to ZFS correctly
> >  under certain circumstances.  I think it would be nice
> >  if one could force ashift when creating a pool.
> >  Automagic is nice, but there's often no substitute for human
> >  intelligence.  I spent a couple of days trying to
> >  persuade OI to create a properly aligned pool before I gave
> >  up.
> >  >
> >  >
> >  >
> >  >
> >  > _______________________________________________
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> >  > OpenIndiana-discuss at openindiana.org
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> >  >
> >
> >
> >  --
> >  Bryan N Iotti
> >
> >  +39 366 3708436
> >  ironsides.medvet at runbox.com
> >
> >  _______________________________________________
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> >  http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
> >
> >
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> >
>
>
> --
> Bryan N Iotti
>
> +39 366 3708436
> ironsides.medvet at runbox.com
>
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