Anyone use nullfs or unionfs ?

[Justin Hopper]

On Tue, 2004-03-23 at 11:07, Bill Squire wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Nullfs works fine on the high-end amd i386 machines, but is rather 'thrashy'
> and inefficient on amd64. Is this a hardware bug or is there a patch to make
> it work? I'm redoing the whole 'jail' concept on FreeBSD and have received
> funding for a project that will be 100% open source. I would like to use 
> amd64's but if nullfs doesn't work right, I can't. It doesn't work right on
> top-of-the-line Intel machines either. 
> 
> As for unionfs, it would be very nice if it truely worked. It seems to not
> be able to deal with very large overlays. Do I need to hack or is someone
> doing that now. Duplicated efforts are a waste. 
> 
> These are facinating fs concepts and I'm surprised nobody(?) sees them 
> as I do. We are in beta test now and code will be posted soon on my 
> site. I own a percentage share of a provider and it seemed necessary to
> keep quite for a year to avoid being 'jumped' by the competition. Many of
> my papers and those of friends on <http://cuba.calyx.nl/> have been used
> in successful commercial applications, some 'closed source'. :(  Fortunately
> papers on cracking 'digital watermarks' and 'CSS' have been widely deployed
> in open source projects. That was offtopic -- just want to know about 
> nullfs or unionfs on amd64.

I too would be very interested in getting nullfs/unionfs up to
production quality.  We use the jail system for all of our hosting
platforms and have been very happy with it after making several
modifications to it to make it more manageable.  We tried using nullfs
and unionfs for a shared default filesystem and experienced a lot of
problems.  I was disappointed to find out that our tests on the 5.x line
had similar problems.  This left us stuck with NFS, which, despite what
I've heard, is not a very solid solution for the shared filesystem
either.

We are investigating using amd64s for our production systems, so I would
be very interested in any project that wants to harden the
nullfs/unionfs functions and I'd contribute what I could to it.
 
-- 
Justin Hopper  <jhopper at bsdhosting.net>
UNIX Systems Engineer
BSDHosting.net
Hosting Division of Digital Oasys Inc.
http://www.bsdhosting.net