ZFS bug = panic on boot = FreeNAS uninstalled

[rakosnicek]

For reasons unknown to myself, whilst trying to copy a file onto a ZFS dataset for the first time, FreeNAS decided to panic. More over, now when it reboots, it panics:
range_tree_vacate()
metaslab_sync()
vdev_sync()
spa_sync()
txg_sync()
... making FreeNAS now unusable.

FreeNAS also panic'd when I tried to install the miniDLNA server whilst it was setting up the jail.

I don't have time to deal with issues like this, nor the going back and forward with email or forum posts.

This is very basic and it doesn't work in quite spectacular style so I'm just going to uninstall it and use something else. Maybe I'll come back in a year or two and try again.

 

[anodos]

For reasons unknown to myself, whilst trying to copy a file onto a ZFS dataset for the first time, FreeNAS decided to panic. More over, now when it reboots, it panics:
range_tree_vacate()
metaslab_sync()
vdev_sync()
spa_sync()
txg_sync()
... making FreeNAS now unusable.

FreeNAS also panic'd when I tried to install the miniDLNA server whilst it was setting up the jail.

I don't have time to deal with issues like this, nor the going back and forward with email or forum posts.

This is very basic and it doesn't work in quite spectacular style so I'm just going to uninstall it and use something else. Maybe I'll come back in a year or two and try again.

Best guess is that your hardware is buggy and/or inadequate for FreeNAS. What are your hardware specs?

 

[danb35]

Certainly it's your call what OS you use to run a NAS device. I can't help but wonder, though, what the point of your post is. If you've already decided to ditch FreeNAS and use something else, you aren't asking for help resolving the issue. If your goal is to make the community aware of an issue, you've utterly failed to provide any relevant information to that. The forum rules (red link at the top of the page) would suggest some information that would be worth including.

You can't seriously believe (and it most assuredly is not the case) that FreeNAS panics any time a file is copied on a ZFS volume. You may have hit a bug, you may have a hardware incompatibility, you may have run into a bug that's long since fixed, or you may have something even you can't reproduce. Without a lot more information about the situation, nobody has any idea what happened.

I'd suggest that if your performance standard for your NAS is that it be 100% flawless, 100% of the time, you're going to be looking for a long time. FreeNAS may or may not be a good match for your use case, and if it isn't, just as well to find out early. But if you're going to toss the whole system after a single problem, good luck to you.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Best guess is that your hardware is buggy and/or inadequate for FreeNAS. What are your hardware specs?

Judging by his one other post (made today at the same time) he's running an old 32bit version of FreeNAS in a VM.

Color me completely unsurprised that things aren't working out.

 

[rakosnicek]

No, not an old 32bit version, but rather the latest 32bit version available to download (as of a month ago or so) - 9.2.1.7.

As for hardware inadequacy, downloaded FreeBSD 9.3/amd64 and 2TB later with samba, no problems.

And after reading about the eagerness of developers here wanting to blame hardware for software problems, there is no point in mentioning hardware when reporting bugs, panics, etc.

Color me unsurprised that there are still software issues with FreeNAS when hardware is always used as the scapegoat.

Oh and since you read the post about CPU load, I went through and disabled all cron jobs and turned off as many daemons as I could to get the CPU to flatline and when it did, FreeNAS flatlined at around 2x MHZ of Synology, with both doing nothing.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Well, let's deconstruct here:

Firstly, FreeNAS in a VM isn't tested or supported.

Since you downloaded the x86 version, you're definitely running ZFS on <8GB of RAM. That's definitely contrary to best practices.

The "eagerness of developers to blame hardware" is because people cobble together all sorts of frightfully bad systems that don't come anywhere close to meeting the system requirements and then blame software. There's a reason a large chunk of the forum rules is devoted to "post your hardware config." Occam's Razor applies strongly here.

And your CPU post (which is now gone?) dealt with two completely different OSes (BSD vs Linux) on different architectures (x86 vs x64) likely running different filesystems (ZFS vs whatever Synology is using) - and in a VM, which won't necessarily have the same ability to use lower power states as bare metal, and to top it off I'd wager it's going to be a largely academic difference when you consider the actual power consumption will be 80% or more the spinning disks in the system. If the CPU/RAM in the FreeNAS machine is working a little harder (because it's keeping ARC full and doing checksumming/compression/etc) and consumes a whole +5W over a Linux machine, I'll gladly shell out the extra penny a day to keep my data secure and fast.

I'm still willing to lend a hand here, and the fact that your 9.3/x64 version worked fine is a pretty clear sign that FreeNAS isn't "broken" - and neither are the myriad of machines that people in this forum run. But as another user put it:

Certainly it's your call what OS you use to run a NAS device. I can't help but wonder, though, what the point of your post is. If you've already decided to ditch FreeNAS and use something else, you aren't asking for help resolving the issue. If your goal is to make the community aware of an issue, you've utterly failed to provide any relevant information to that. The forum rules (red link at the top of the page) would suggest some information that would be worth including.

 

[rakosnicek]

If there are system requirements then why doesn't the installer or booter for FreeNAS enforce them?

When I was measuring CPU use in FreeNAS vs Synology, there was no ZFS configured on FreeNAS. There was nothing configured. I turned as much as I could off. And it was doing no work as NAS. It was *idle*. So maybe, yes, it is BSD vs Linux but there you have it: the Linux kerneluses less power than BSD.

What's the point of my post?

I don't know what optimizations or changes go into FreeNAS (vs FreeBSD) but something they've done (or not done) is very very bad. This was my first adventure with FreeNAS and my last for a long while. I've never had any VM specific problems (especially reoccuring ZFS panics on boot!) from using ZFS inside a VM in almost 10 years of using ZFS. And I've never before seen a reboot loop like that before either.

 

[anodos]

No, not an old 32bit version, but rather the latest 32bit version available to download (as of a month ago or so) - 9.2.1.7.
And after reading about the eagerness of developers here wanting to blame hardware for software problems, there is no point in mentioning hardware when reporting bugs, panics, etc.

You are under the misconception that you're actually communicating with FreeNAS developers. They are rarely -if ever- on these forums. If you have a bug report, then file a bug report.
Instability in a virtualized environment is not a good gauge of the quality of an OS. For instance, for a long time OpenBSD was unstable as a virtualbox guest.

 

[danb35]

Perhaps, rather than saying "what's the point", I should have asked, "what did you hope or intend to accomplish by making your post?" It doesn't sound like you want help, as you've said you already removed FreeNAS in favor of something else. Well and good--we (if I may take the liberty of ever-so-briefly speaking for others on this forum) won't get butthurt if you use something other than FreeNAS.

But then what? If you're wanting to report a problem, you haven't given anywhere near enough information for anyone to take action on it, and if you've been in a position to be using ZFS for 10 years, I'd expect you'd know that. If you just want to whine, well, that's up to you, but IMO this isn't the place for it.

If your concern is that FreeNAS isn't working well in a virtualized environment, that's a known and documented limitation, and the developers don't seem to have particular interest in changing it.

 

[cyberjock]

First, if you are turning things off at the CLI, you've very likely broken assumptions that the FreeNAS developers had when writing their code. Dependencies break and suddenly you're looking at a system that isn't performing or behaving properly.

Second, if this is such a big deal, why are you still here? If you've decided FreeNAS isn't for you I give you 3 very good options:

1. Stick with what you know works and be happy.
2. Submit code fixes that make it work more like you would like it to work.
3. Put in some feature request tickets with what you know is likely to give you a better outcome.

Pick any one or all 3, it doesn't matter. But complaining here is going to get nothing accomplished in terms of improving FreeNAS. If you are here to complain and nothing else then please go do that somewhere else. We're here to make progress and make things better, not pander to people that want to argue their side of the story but don't care about making progress.

 

[rs225]

Even though it is an unsupported config (for all the reasons above), never hurts to run a memtest directly on the host machine, and if you had multiple virtual CPUs for FreeNAS, try just one instead.