by Pedro M. S. Oliveira | Apr 13, 2011 | Linux
Hi,
Today I was reading about btrfs and as never used it before I thought in giving it a try.
On my laptop I have a ssd with 256GB, there I created 2 LVM2 volumes to use and test btrfs.
It’s not the ideal solution because there’s a LVM layer but I’m not in the mood for backup,erasing,installing,erasing and installing. So the tests I’m going to do are just on the FS itself, not on all the layers that btrfs supports. A good thing in using a ssd card is that the access time is equal for all the block device and the data position on the block device is not accountable, so this is a very good opportunity to have measurements both on ext4 and btrfs.
Here’s the benchmark architecture, tools and setup:
Kernel:
Linux MartiniMan-LAP 2.6.38-31-desktop #1 SMP PREEMPT 2011-04-06 09:01:38 +0200 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
LVM lv creation command:
lvcreate -L 20G -n TestingBTRfs /dev/mapper/system
lvcreate -L 20G -n TestingExt4fs /dev/mapper/system
LVM lvdisplay output:
--- Logical volume ---
LV Name /dev/system/TestingBTRfs
VG Name system
LV UUID zBYf0d-metk-VC9U-YkjE-z1Ts-NMLb-HzYmrJ
LV Write Access read/write
LV Status available
LV Size 20.00 GiB
Current LE 5120
Segments 1
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors auto
- currently set to 256
Block device 253:3
--- Logical volume ---
LV Name /dev/system/TestingExt4fs
VG Name system
LV UUID FJEfiv-Hs9W-zGuV-sJIo-3INN-gh52-YgmsVl
LV Write Access read/write
LV Status available
LV Size 20.00 GiB
Current LE 5120
Segments 1
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors auto
- currently set to 256
Block device 253:4
FS creation command:
mkfs.ext4 /dev/system/TestingExt4fs
mkfs.btrfs /dev/system/TestingBTRfs
Processor:
model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU T7200 @ 2.00GHz
HardDrive:
Device Model: SAMSUNG MMDOE56G5MXP-0VB
Mount command (as you can see I didn’t do any optimizations, noatime, etc):
/dev/mapper/system-TestingBTRfs on /mnt/btrf type btrfs (rw)
/dev/mapper/system-TestingExt4fs on /mnt/ext4 type ext4 (rw)
Test software:
'Iozone' Filesystem Benchmark Program
Version $Revision: 3.373 $
Compiled for 64 bit mode.
Command line for the tests:
Command line used:
./iozone -Ra -r4k -r8k -r16k -r32k -r64k -r128 -r1024 -r4096k -r16384k -s1g
This command was used in the btrfs and the ext4 volumes.
The options mean:
-R excel/
office compatible format.
-a auto test
-r the record size (you can see I used several (4k,8k…))
-s size of test file (I used 1GB)
Here’s the test results:
And the charts (The scale is logarithmic):
(you may download the data here: [download id=”1″])
Conclusions
As you can see on the charts for sequential reading/writing there’s a performance gain in BTRfs with the smaller record sizes but the inverse is also true, EXT4 has more performance on larger record sizes.
If you look to the random data access while reading or writing you’ll see that EXT4 is far faster that BTRfs, and this is according to my daily usage pattern would be 70% of the access to my hard drive. To be sincere I’m a bit surprised on such a difference. I know I didn’t tune any of the file systems and the purpose of this benchmark is not having to, just playing with the defaults as most of the installations out there.
Another conclusion that is really simple to understand is that bigger record sizes mean best performance.
For now I think I’ll stick to EXT4 and LVM, who knows if I’ll sometime soon I’ll change to BTRFS, I’ll let it grow and advise you to do the same.
Cheers,
Pedro Oliveira
by Pedro M. S. Oliveira | Sep 12, 2009 | Linux
As a part of my work I have to design and plan Hardware, Systems and Software deployment, and as many of you guys know sometimes it’s not that easy. Dimensioning hardware for specific roles can be a pain, sometimes you don’t even have the software as it’s being “produced” by the development team and still you have to tell how many machines, routers, switches and all the small things the project will take.
But some other projects aren’t this difficult and you don’t need such an amount of flexibility to do them, you don’t need a custom based firewall cluster, you don’t need a web server or database cluster, you just need a simple, reliable and out of the box setup that make things work in the smallest amount of time.
When you need something like this many sys admins have an excellent way to things in a tested and production prof way (specially if they are open mined to use open source);
The Software Appliances
The appliances are really helpful but before you start using them you need to know a few things, so lets start by the bad:
- Lack of flexibility
- Hardware choices are often hard due to the lack of drivers/modules available
The lack of flexibility is probably the biggest problem with appliances, usually they aren’t inflexible but to master the appliance you’ll have to put a big effort on the manuals, this should’ t be a problem if you stick to a few appliances but if you use a lot of them then you’ll probably take more time to master them than to study the OS and all the applications your need (apache, samba, iptables, and so on). About hardware choices, appliances are suited to run on most hardware out there (after all they use a linux kernel, at least most of them do) but if you run cutting edge hardware you may find it hard to make it work with your appliance, specially if your appliance version as more than 6month-1year.
Let’s go to the good now:
- Easy installation.
- Fewer skills required.
- Dedicated support, sometimes paid, usually free from the community.
- Performance boost (In the cases where the appliance comes with it’s how hardware).
- Security.
So in conclusion appliances can be a great help, but they need extensive planning and testing before going to a production environment. Think not only about the present needs of your client but also about the future and expected ones. Bellow I’m going to write about my favorite software appliances and what are they for.
- dd-wrt – This is a great appliance for a bunch of Linksys, Asus, and another brand router, access point, home gateways, etc.
- Endian FW – Probably the appliance I use the most, you need firewall with a proxy server with content filtering? Do you need a VPN server or an antivirus scanner for your internet connection? Try this one.
- SME server – Do you need a windows domain server, a smtp server, pop server? Do you need to setup a small office in 2 hours? Choose SME server.
There are a lot of other appliances I’ve used since I’ve started working below a few honor mentions:
- GeexBox – For multimedia content displaying
- IPcop – Similar to endian (but endian has more features)
I’m done with appliances today, but you may wonder… what about the ugly? Well I didn’t find any that goes in this category, but the word goes well on the title 🙂 .
Cheers,
Pedro Oliveira
by Pedro M. S. Oliveira | Aug 5, 2009 | Linux
From sometime now I’ve been working on debugging software, I don’ mind using betas (with all the inherent pain), as a matter of fact I like it a lot. But recently I had a problem with my MERLIN U740 PCMCIA card (it’s a 3G modem). This card emulates two USB ports and in one there’s the modem. This as been working for year without problems but since the kernel 2.6.24 it stopped working in x86_64. I didn’t care that much as i was working out of the country and didn’t use the card. But now I need to use it so I posted a bug report in OpenSuSE (the distro i use) and I’ve been testing their output on this bug. Finally its solved in the kernel 2.6.31 (from the release candidate 3) and it will be included in the main stream OpenSuSE distribution 11.2 (it’s already included in the factory version).
The bug I’m talking about is described in:
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=502557
and it’s about the following kernel messages:
So in the end i can say I’m pretty happy with Linux support, and this kind of support is available to open source distros, not only to enterprise level distributions such as SLES or RHE. Just keep on filling those bugs reports when you find one.
Cheers,
Pedro Oliveira
