FreeNAS 8.3.1-RELEASE

[cyberjock]

Autotune is for systems with >8GB of RAM if I remember correctly. I think it says that in the manual. I always have 16GB minimum so I always check it. Autotune increases a couple of settings to use more memory to improve performance. In your case, you might not be able to boot anymore if you enabled it.

If you are running ZFS with only 2GB of RAM you are really taking a risk of kernel panics and the resulting loss of data from an unmountable zpool. The 6GB of RAM requirement to use ZFS is no joke and plenty of people thought they could get away with less and lost their entire zpool.

 

[Simon00]

Autotune is for systems with >8GB of RAM if I remember correctly. I think it says that in the manual. I always have 16GB minimum so I always check it. Autotune increases a couple of settings to use more memory to improve performance. In your case, you might not be able to boot anymore if you enabled it.

If you are running ZFS with only 2GB of RAM you are really taking a risk of kernel panics and the resulting loss of data from an unmountable zpool. The 6GB of RAM requirement to use ZFS is no joke and plenty of people thought they could get away with less and lost their entire zpool.

These machines are using 1GB DDR3 SDRAM per slot (2 total)... and can ONLY accept 2GB DDR3 SDRAM :( so... 4GB is its max... Oh well... I'd better start saving up for a "new" computer to use w/ FreeNAS + ZFS....

 

[cyberjock]

Well, it looks like we have another person with the same problem as Nik had.

http://forums.freenas.org/showthrea...ZFS)-status-is-UNKNOWN-after-Upgrade-to-8-3-0

William, have you looked into this at all? Any ideas what the problem is or if a fix is in the works? Just curious...

 

[William Grzybowski]

No I did not.

 

[Simon00]

If you are running ZFS with only 2GB of RAM you are really taking a risk of kernel panics and the resulting loss of data from an unmountable zpool. The 6GB of RAM requirement to use ZFS is no joke and plenty of people thought they could get away with less and lost their entire zpool.

Hi cyberjock,

Today I tested the system by pushing it memory use w/ only 2GB of ram beyond its limits and it appears to crash and became unreachable... However, I always have an image of the boot SD card and as soon as I placed a fresh copy of a known good backup of my 8.3.1 setup, everything went back to normal, did a complete scrub just in case.

FreeNAS 8.3.1 seems to destroy itself on the bootable SD media when it crashes. I'm not sure if it is the config file that gets destroyed or what, but an image of an earlier setup fixes it every time. I now have two additional backup SD cards to swap as soon as it refuses to boot... :)

I wonder if this is a know flaw.....??

 

[cyberjock]

SD Cards make bad bootable disks. I tried using them myself, but they just don't seem to work right. No clue why this is the case, I'd have expected them to work just as well as any USB stick but a bit slower.

 

[Simon00]

I often just tell the BIOS to boot from the USB reader 1st and treat it as if it is a USB hard drive. The MOST important thing is the USB-to-SD bridge controller. I did read & write test on the SD card & reader to make absolute sure I am getting SD class 10 speeds and the bottleneck is the card itself at 18MB/s which is quite good, faster than ANY USB 2.0 thumb drive I currently own... I buy mostly cheap ones. I'm not sure if the kernel in FreeNAS/BSD supports booting from USB 3.0 ports/sticks or else I'd consider getting one of those newer mini-itx motherboards to replace my current memory starved system...

 

[Nik]

Well, it looks like we have another person with the same problem as Nik had.

http://forums.freenas.org/showthrea...ZFS)-status-is-UNKNOWN-after-Upgrade-to-8-3-0

William, have you looked into this at all? Any ideas what the problem is or if a fix is in the works? Just curious...

I tested a bit and came to the conclusion that this problems only appears when the LOG and L2ARC is on the same physical drive using 2 partitions. It does not matter if I remove the LOG and L2ARC from the pool before I upgrade to 8.3.1 and add it again after the update. If I do that I can upgrade without any problems , but if I add the LOG and L2ARC partitions again the POOL will become inaccessible straight away after the next reboot.
My solution was to add another SSD to the pool so I have a dedicated LOG and L2ARC SSD.
No problems since then.

Regards,
Nik