Some disks with internal sectors larger than 512 bytes (e.g., 4k) can
suffer from bad write performance when ashift is not configured
correctly. This is caused by the disk not reporting its actual sector
size, but a sector size of 512 bytes. The drive may behave this way
for compatibility reasons. For example, the WDC WD20EARS disks are
known to exhibit this behavior.
When creating a zpool, ZFS takes that wrong sector size and sets the
"ashift" property accordingly (to 9: 1<<9=512), whereas it should be
set to 12 for 4k sectors (1<<12=4096).
This patch allows an adminstrator to manual specify the known correct
ashift size at 'zpool create' time. This can significantly improve
performance in certain cases. However, it will have an impact on your
total pool capacity. See the updated ashift property description
in the zpool.8 man page for additional details.
Valid values for the ashift property range from 9 to 17 (512B-128KB).
Additionally, you may set the ashift to 0 if you wish to auto-detect
the sector size based on what the disk reports, this is the default
behavior. The most common ashift values are 9 and 12.
Example:
zpool create -o ashift=12 tank raidz2 sda sdb sdc sdd
Closes#280
Original-patch-by: Richard Laager <rlaager@wiktel.com>
Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
To simplify the process of using zfs as your root filesystem a
zfs-drucat sub-package has been added. This sub-package adds a zfs
dracut module which allows your initramfs to be rebuilt with zfs
support. The process for doing this is still complicated but there
is clearly interest from the community about getting this working
well and documented. This should help lay some of the groundwork.
Longer term these changes should be pushed in the upstream dracut
package. Once that occurs this subpackage will no longer be
required for new systems, however we may want to conditionally
build this package in the future for systems running older
dracut versions.
Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
This file has gotten stale and needed to be updated. There are
individuals who deserve to be recognized for their contributions
to the project. I've done my best to assemble names from the
commit logs of those who have submitted patches. This list may
not be comprehensive, if you feel I've overlooked your contribution
please let me know and we can get your name added.
