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Btrfs/ZFS/bcachefs under workloads classic benchmarks skip

33 pointsby 1h agobartosz.fenski.pl
24 comments
1h agoHN ↗

@farlight assuming that you're the creator do you think you'd be able to rework the HTML/CSS? I'm sure you've got good data but speaking on behalf of my eyeballs, the results page is... hard to read!

1h agoHN ↗

2G of random garbage is written directly onto one member device (behind the filesystem's back, offset 1G — python injector; uutils dd mis-seeks on dm devices), caches dropped, then a full scrub: btrfs scrub -B, zpool scrub + wait, bcachefs scrub, md/lvm sync-action 'check' (which can only COUNT mismatches — no checksums to know which copy is right).

I'm not sure that nuking 2G of the underlying block device is a recoverable error on any filesystem that I'm aware of? Can you confirm if any ofthe filesystems really came out of the other side in a usable state after scrubbing?

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Trivial-op p99, idle (ms) # A trivial operation — one 4k write + fsync every 200ms (like a shell appending history or an editor updating its swap file) — run alone for 10s. p99 of the fsync completion

In fact, if it's OK for me to ask, are any of the metrics tht you used standard industry metrics? It looks like several of the tests are bypassing the kernel's page cache? -- which I worry may fall into the trap of "I modified the system to be unrepresentative of reality and then tested it".

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kernel 7.0.0-1012-azure

Can you confirm if you tested on a bare metal machine? were you the only tenant?

1h agoHN ↗

1 device out of the replica set I’m assuming so all of them should recover.

57m agoHN ↗

The integrity check is only on the tests which are either RAID or the filesystem equivalent.

56m agoHN ↗

Except for the fact that the developer has sabotaged the project into being removed from mainline?

18m agoHN ↗

Sabotage might not be the best word, but it hurt trust and adoption.

24m agoHN ↗

It's relatively easy to get it working as a kernel module at least. I got it set up on a NixOS box without too much trouble.

19m agoHN ↗

That might be the best thing happened to the project since now development can happen at its own pace without the clicky bait influencers.

In fact they delivered the erasure coding for parity raid back in march this year.

The thing is that as soon as you seriously give a chance to Bcachefs you see how good it is. I can only tell you that mixing different device tiers and having a per-file/directory replication setting is a god send specially in these times where storage costs more than gold.

1h agoHN ↗

For peace of mind I'm still using zfs (since the last 15+ years) but I'm definitely not impressed by the performance...

57m agoHN ↗

Different tools for different jobs; use ZFS for your data store and ext4 for your primary drive.

51m agoHN ↗

CI runs use loop devices on shared ephemeral VMs (one VM per filesystem): compare shapes and ratios, not absolute MB/s. Each job records a host-calibration anchor — see the table.

I think if you're not using baremetal for such tests, it's likely that the results are simply not comparable at all? What if another tenant is also using the disk?

45m agoHN ↗

It's a fair point but it's also possible the person running the tests has a dedicated test hypervisor for this , so that different configurations of filesystems and VMs can be created and destroyed quickly in an automated manner.

If it's something as simple as a KVM hypervisor that only runs 1 test VM at a time (with no other load from anything else other than the basic systemd daemons, ssh daemon etc running on the hypervisor), the results could be very close to bare metal.

I can see it being very time consuming and annoying to do repeated manual bare metal OS installs and new partitioning/filesystem creation for such a large variety of tests.

The author does also say that performance isn't really the main thing but rather, data integrity:

https://github.com/fenio/modern-fs-benchmark

35m agoHN ↗

compare shapes and ratios, not absolute MB/s

In this case, given that the author's own disclaimer (above) already disclaims the numeric readings, I'm not sure how it's possible to make any inference on "shapes and ratios" derived from the numeric readings.

33m agoHN ↗

I can see it being very time consuming and annoying to do repeated manual bare metal OS installs.

Well don't do that then. There's lots of other options. Probably the simplest is a single bare metal install on a simple filesystem on one device. run the filesystems under test on other storage dedicated to testing.

You could also boot into a network install and use local storage exclusively for testing.

31m agoHN ↗

Yes exactly. The issueThe epherrality of the VMs isn't an issue, it's the _shared_ part that's the concern here. Going by the fact that the kernel is listed as "kernel 7.0.0-1012-azure" I feel like it's a fair risk that there may have been noisy neighbours.

36m agoHN ↗

I think the reviews should also include the social aspect of these filesystems...

There is and have been many promising and exciting FS to replace the old boring ones, but for storage you not only want to avoid technical issues but also maintainer(s) drama...

5m agoHN ↗

Why do people keep bringing up drama?

The community infighting has sucked, but that's a thing that matters primarily for maintainers.

I think most users just want something that works.

26m agoHN ↗

what does "integrity" fail mean in the first table? that the case didn't recover from the 2G corruption?

19m agoHN ↗

So two filesystems that are essentially shunned from the Linux kernel and permanent second-class citizens, and one that was removed from Red Hat and has a questionable history of reliability. Oh boy which do I choose?

I'm saying ZFS on another OS.