Re: RAID and file system encryption

[dexen deVries <dexen.devries-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>]

On Tuesday 02 of August 2011 10:22:24 you wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Just want to find out if nilfs2 supports RAID and native file system
> encryption. Any plans to, if it does not?

not by itself, but it stacks nicely over LVM2 and LUKS for, respectively, RAID 
and encryption. Guess that's more unix-ish than having one program (here: 
nilfs2 driver) have every possible feature built-in.


> Also, at this stage in its development, are there any serious drawbacks to
> using nilfs2 on a desktop distribution?

there are small ones. There is no KDE GUI for browsing snapshots (as of yet).

Free space does not increase immediately after removing files, which may 
surprise users that aren't aware of the snapshotting.

Last but not least, the filesystem plays badly with Bitcoin (and perhaps other 
similar programs). Bitcoin causes very many checkpoints to be created, quickly 
eating up the free space. AFAIK, it's because bitcoin issues numberous small 
transactions to the underlying BDB very often, even 2...4/second in some 
cases. And bitcoin's BDB is configured to use 64kb `page' size, IIRC. I've got 
sick of it and moved entire bitcoin database to XFS, leaving only wallet.dat 
on NILFS2.

On the other hand, NILFS2 works well under mild-loaded MySQL, both on test www 
server and for KDE's internal data like Nepomuk and Akonadi storage. I keep 30 
days worth of checkpoints on the test server, has already helped us once to 
recover certain old files. On PCs and workstations I keep about 10...48h worth 
of checkpoints.

NILFS2 performs nicely under mixed workload, both in home and workplace use. 
Worth noting is that checkout of large GIT repository (kernel sources) takes 
exceptionally short.


Regards,
-- 
dexen deVries

[[[↓][→]]]

For example, if the first thing in the file is:
   <?kzy irefvba="1.0" rapbqvat="ebg13"?>
an XML parser will recognize that the document is stored in the traditional 
ROT13 encoding.

(( Joe English, http://www.flightlab.com/~joe/sgml/faq-not.txt ))
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