HCD [bfs]: Status Report #1

Blog post by emitrax on Sun, 2008-06-22 17:33

It's been almost a month already since the very first Haiku Code Drive began!

First of all thanks to all of those who have voted me, I was very surprised about the poll result.

Now some updates about my project.

As you know, my project aims to test the stability of the bfs file system. In order to do so
the idea is to first implement XSI Posix semaphores, and then compile bonnie++ which is a benchmark suite
for file systems. To be honest though, XSI Posix semaphore are not really mandatory, because it would be
faster to just port bonnie++ to Haiku, as it would require very few changes (e.g. those concerned locking).
However though, in the long run, Haiku would benifit more if I implement the semaphores previously mentioned,
as it would also make it more Posix compliant.

The easiest part was the user space one, now I'm working on the kernel side. I also started a thread
about this on the gsoc mailing list so you can follow it by clicking on the link below.
http://www.freelists.org/archives/haiku-gsoc/06-2008/msg00009.html

Although I'm not done with the above though, I've already started running some test without bonnie++
and hitting the first bug. See ticket #2400.

The test is quite simple but very time consuming, especially on my current hardware (by the way,
if someone is willing to try the test with real hardware or a faster maching please contact me).

I first packed the whole haiku source code into a tarball from linux, move it to my usb disk, run
vmware, and try to unpack the almost 500MB tarball (1.5 GB unpacked) from Haiku.
Yeah... "Good luck with that! :)"

The result, which at first seemed to me as a bfs bug, turned out to be a vfs one, although we are still discussing about it in the gsoc mailing list. See the link below for more details.
http://www.freelists.org/archives/haiku-gsoc/06-2008/msg00021.html

Despite the fact it has been confirmed not to be a bfs bug, as you can read from the mailing list, I'm still trying to fix it, while also finishing xsi sempahore implementation.

That's all for now.

Comments

Re: HCD [bfs]: Status Report #1

I have real hw I test Haiku on regularly but it's a slow machine (by today's standards)! PIII 800MHz with 320MB RAM.

Re: HCD [bfs]: Status Report #1

Bah, I guess I'm *still* not receiving notifications on new content creation from Drupal...

Anyhow, I can test on any of several machines if you'd like...

The faster machines that I currently test Haiku on:

- Core 2 Duo E6750 w/4gb RAM and ECS G33T-M2 board with intel gma3100 chipset using SATA
- Dell Optiplex GX270 with 2.8ghz P4 and 1gb RAM using PATA
- Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop with 2ghz P4 Celeron and 1gb RAM using PATA

I also have several slower desktops and laptops (P3/P2) which have Haiku environments on them.

Re: HCD [bfs]: Status Report #1

Hah! Urias, you should start a shop ;-)

Re: HCD [bfs]: Status Report #1

nutela wrote:

Hah! Urias, you should start a shop ;-)

You should see my home office here...

Re: HCD [bfs]: Status Report #1

Thanks for the offer.

The test is quite simple. Just pack the whole haiku source tree with the following
tar cfvz haiku.tar.gz path/to/haiku/source
move the tarball to a usb stick, and try to unpack it from the usb stick.

If you have little memory and a slow computer like in my case (vmware at 1Ghz and 256MB)
the test will probably fail too, but anyway, let me know the result of the test.
Feel free to contact me privately.

Re: HCD [bfs]: Status Report #1

Um is USB massstorage stable then?

Re: HCD [bfs]: Status Report #1

I'm not sure if this is BFS bug ( or another bug ).

I was trying to Jam Haiku on Haiku R26311 and ended up with corrupted BFS.

I checked using chkbfs and got:
bfs: /dev/disk/ata/4/master/2 is read-only!
Files processed: 5405
BFS has 2 blocks allocated that should not be.

Block allocation mismatches detected. Fixing.
error 0xffffffff from bitmap swap ioctl...

File system check completed.

Very sure it was Jam that caused this because with 512 MB it crashed ( not enough memory ). Going to try to reproduce and then report this bug as a ticket.

Just today, I had initialized the partition, copied over a fresh install of Haiku, checked it with chkbfs and all was good . Then checked after running Jam & few other programs & had BFS issue.

Re: HCD [bfs]: Status Report #1

Well, I ran chkbfs and it ended up fixing the FS. So, I ran Jam a few times and no errors - even with jam -j3.

Now I can't really say what caused the issue in the first place. Maybe it was jam or another program that I ran - just not sure.

Re: HCD [bfs]: Status Report #1

i don't know about stable but it was working last time it checked on real hw