Posted on Sat 10/25/08 in FreeBSD
Why running ext2/3 under BSD is a bad idea (from personal experience).
Of course my storage disks were using ext3 format. I’ve been running Linux on my server for over two years, so ext3 was kind of a given. When changing the OS on the system to FreeBSD, one of the first things I did was check ext2/3 compatibility. Some posts said support was shaky, but those posts were from 2004 or earlier. More recent posts said there was nothing to worry about, so I did not worry and went along my merry way.
When the server started crashing “randomly”, I blamed the torrent daemon I was trying to get running (BTG). When the same thing happened with another torrent daemon, Transmission, I thought there were hardware compatibility issues with BSD. Being stubborn, I didn’t buy it and went on.
After each crash, I had to fsck the disks, which was a pain since it took quite some time with the disks ranging from 320G to 500G each. In the meantime I continued testing and managed to download some torrents fine. I was surprised and happy! When my disk checking was done, I set the torrent work dir back (from a UFS formatted disk) to one of my storage disks (Ext2). Lo’ and behold, the server crashed within minutes of adding a new torrent.
Needless to say, my Ext3 file system was the culprit. In fact, when I was copying something to / from one of the Ext3 disks, any other action on the system could crash it. Meanwhile, I have been moving the data off the storage disks (one at a time) to UFS disks and formatting the Ext3 to UFS afterwards. At this time, all disks are UFS formatted and the system has been rock stable under any load.
Bottom line: Do not keep using your Ext2/3 file systems when using BSD. Change them to UFS and sleep peacefully.
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