On 05/11/2013 07:22 PM, Linda Walsh wrote:
Lew Wolfgang wrote:
Hi Folks,
We were smitten by a rather subtle change in how 12.3-64 mounts XFS files systems. The first indication was a failure of acroread to start for a particular user. Other users on the same system weren't affected. It turns out it's an old problem talked about here:
http://forums.adobe.com/message/4721987
Our workaround is to stop using XFS for home directories. We'll continue to use XFS for huge RAID arrays handling lots of large files.
Thanks for the comments Linda.
You could change the mount options as a workaround, now that you know the source of the problem. Admittedly, having the inode numbers bumped when you are not expecting them might not be great.
True, but that wouldn't help for the high inodes already created. I think the problem would still exist.
I would bet that if you used the 32-bit package -- to match the 32-bit applications, they probably wouldn't use the inode64 option on the mounts..
Conversely, if you used 64-bit apps on a 64-bit machine, they likely wouldn't have any problems. I'm guessing that it was probably a reasonable direction to take to have 64-bit systems be allowed to use 64-bit inodes when needed.
Agreed.
The penalty for using 32-bit inodes on a larger disk -- I *believe* is that the inodes have to be stored only in the area addressable by 32-bits of sectors -- though it looks like it might only be 31... ah, it's probably an 'int'... (signed) instead of unsigned... maybe for returning error codes.
Anyway -- it means when accessing files located above a 1TB mark, the disk will first seek down below 1TB to read the inode -- then seek up to where the data is. If it is following a directory chain, it will need to fetch each subdirectory from the low area (it might be in memory after the first read, but .. worst case would be they were spread out).
That's about what the xfs documents say.
Anyway -- just a heads-up on the future performance issues (likely not noticeable if things are mostly below 1TB...But if you go to a RAID put disks in a large volume with lvm, it's not hard to get way beyond 1TB pretty easily.
Another workaround -- Create smaller partitions -- I.e. instead of one 2TB partition, create 2 x 1TB partitions... still, it's a hassle.. hopefully you'll be able to get 64-bit updates to use on your 64-bit OS... Otherwise -- why not stay @ 32bit and you'd miss this issue entirely.
We use multiple partitions bigger than 20-TB containing thousands of 4-GB files. This is why we selected xfs some years ago and haven't had any "known" issues until now. We'll just be careful with home partitions, which don't really need to be xfs in the first place. Acroread wouldn't know what to do with a 4-GB binary file anyway!
Some different ideas for solutions might give you more options... Hope it helps..
Thanks again. I brought it up here in case other folks might run into the issue. Of course, I wonder what issues reiserfs and/or ext4 have? :-) Regards, Lew -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org