# OS and filesystem safeness FreeBSD



## whathappen (Dec 14, 2009)

I am currently using a cheap ($70 AUD) asus am2+ motherboard along with a phenom x3 CPU and 2 gigs of RAM.

Here is a description of my problems. In short IDE dvd burners dont work in linux but do in windows xp.

And so I've given up on linux because of SCSI errors on IDE dvd drives.

But if I go to try FreeBSD first I need to know if it can handle power-loss without errors.

Right now it is running Archlinux. I use this machine inside a wooden box with alfoil lining and stuff as a portable dj music console. It has a monitor with stand removed tied into a wooden lid on hinges and a keyboard + mouse are on a lid under that (that when is opened as well lets you have access to the internals).

Recently I got 2 pioneer IDE dvd burners for disc-to-disc copy burning, thinking that SATA dvd burners are still dodgy with support like they were last time I looked into it.

Well archlinux sees the devices (hda and hdb now that I've made it use ide module instead of pata module), and gives an error message whenever no media is present as expected, but when media is present, gives input/output errors. It has all sorts of SCSI command errors in wodim. I try using gui apps in gnome in a console-kit session, and as root using command line tools, tried pata and ide kernel modules, tried this tried that.

Everyone in the linux world says that the drives must be broken to give such errors, but hey guess what? Plug a windows hdd into the box and after it realises its in a new pc and does its hardware detection thing, I use imgburn to burn those discs. Works perfectly, windows xp (without any special drivers installed) works, the "bleeding edge" fully up-to-date linux distro doesn't work at all, no matter what. I thought it might be that the cable is dodgy, linux is using some advanced DMA stuff, but windows is only doing some basic bios access or something, I don't know for sure about such things.

I installed nvidia chipset drivers in windows, so ethernet is now detected (along with full hardware acceleration for everything else), and I set the dvds to max speed, still work fine in windows. I go into the bios and disable some UDMA stuff, still can't read any data off them in linux.

I thought maybe the burners won't even let you read a disc unless the region code is set, so I did that in windows, tried again in linux, nothing but scsi errors trying to read from the discs. I tried wodim with ATA ATAPI all sorts, nothing but errors.

It's an unacknowledged, non-cared about software problem on archlinux / linux kernels side I'm sure of it, but what can I do?

The problem is, is that sometimes someone trips over the power cord, or the power to the building goes off, and it isn't shut down "nicely".

I like archlinux because of all the different filesystems used.

I use JFS for everything, except for the huge .flac collection which is on an XFS fs. These are meta-data journaling filesystems, as long as you're not writing file contents when the power cuts (which I'm not, not updating tags of files or updating filesystem at a gig), then no prob not shutting-down cleanly.

But dvd-drives don't work. I could just use windows, and tell it not to have write-ahead caching on the drives, and be happy. But I don't want to. I want to use arch linux with optical drive support, but arch linux won't let me.


The system has integrated nvidia graphics. I want to run it in AMD64 mode.

I thought about solaris (it has amd64 support, had nvidia driver support before linux, and can use OSS4 which will support the soundcard), but solaris is slow to start up, and I wouldn't be surprised if FS gets corrupted on power-loss, or needs to spend 10 minutes scanning when rebooting, or booting into single user mode first, or some other bs.

Is freebsd likely to be as robust as arch has been?

IDE DVD burners will surely work in freebsd no?

If you have other suggestions, then suggest away. But as far as I can see there is linux (archlinux), bsd (Freebsd), and solaris (opensolaris).

I could try other Linux distros but it's probably kernel trouble on this motherboard, plus I don't want to waste my time downloading and installing more of the same before I try different things. But you tell me if Freebsd has no problems with likely power-loss so long as I'm not writing to anything, because to be honest I won't automatically assume that it will. I've found being booted into single user mode and having to restart again with freebsd in the past, and having other boot-up problems (admittedly that was when upgrading from 7.1 to 7.2, but it didn't seem to have very high constitution for such tasks, makes me wonder about what with other things).

What sort of filesystems does Freebsd support? Just the one right, and then dodgy ZFS support in a separate module?

Also the system has 2 1tb hdds from different vendors (samsung and seagate), and uses linux mdadm to mirror them so that if one fails its still good. But I've read that I can use geom to boot off a similar mirror, so that's good.

So long as I turn atime off on the fs, I'm okay right? Or am I?


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## graudeejs (Dec 14, 2009)

whathappen said:
			
		

> Is freebsd likely to be as robust as arch has been?



Arch, robous... ye right....



			
				whathappen said:
			
		

> IDE DVD burners will surely work in freebsd no?



God, knows... should work



			
				whathappen said:
			
		

> But you tell me if Freebsd has no problems with likely power-loss so long as I'm not writing to anything, because to be honest I won't automatically assume that it will. I've found being booted into single user mode and having to restart again with freebsd in the past,


So, what? It works doesn't it?



			
				whathappen said:
			
		

> and having other boot-up problems (admittedly that was when upgrading from 7.1 to 7.2, but it didn't seem to have very high constitution for such tasks, makes me wonder about what with other things).


You probably didn't read manual... I have never had any problems to update FreeBSD (doing src updates/upgrades)



			
				whathappen said:
			
		

> What sort of filesystems does Freebsd support?


UFS2 in many forms [With/Without soft updates, with gjournal]
ZFS
I don't count others....



			
				whathappen said:
			
		

> Just the one right, and then dodgy ZFS support in a separate module?


No, It supports other FS as well



			
				whathappen said:
			
		

> Also the system has 2 1tb hdds from different vendors (samsung and seagate), and uses linux mdadm to mirror them so that if one fails its still good. But I've read that I can use geom to boot off a similar mirror, so that's good.


Lear about ZFS, it has great features.. I use it on my desktop... day to day... haven't lost a singe bit since I started using it. And I have had nasty power failures....



			
				whathappen said:
			
		

> So long as I turn atime off on the fs, I'm okay right? Or am I?


What's that supposed to mean?


Anyway, stick in FreeBSD dvd and see what works and what doesn't.... We can't guess that.... see yourself, show output of `# dmesg`

and ye, read handbook, if you're going to install freebsd

P.S.
Huge block of text....


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## whathappen (Dec 14, 2009)

> Arch, robous... ye right....


Well what I mean is that when it boots it boots. No checks no nothing it just boots and runs no errors no matter how much I pull the power on it. But now I find that I can not ever get it to talk to DVD burners.



> So, what? It works doesn't it?


Yes it does, that is why I am considering it for this. What I don't want is this:

Everyone is standing around saying "come on put the music back on. Come on the power has come back already. Come on sing us a song." While I'm doing google searches on a mobile phone and typing away on a single user console. You get the idea?



> Lear about ZFS, it has great features.. I use it on my desktop... day to day... haven't lost a singe bit since I started using it. And I have had nasty power failures....


Good, thanks. This is the sort of thing that I was asking about. I expected people to say "oh no, don't ever do that. If you cut the power your drive will surely be corrupted, especially with ZFS."



> What's that supposed to mean?


Maybe it is a linux-only thing then. noatime is No Access Time, it means mount the filesystem with the option that says not to update the last access timestamp on files as they are read. atime updates mean even if you are only reading, the metadata is writing...



> P.S.
> Huge block of text....


Yes, I wanted to write everything relevant in case anyone had any questions, they wouldn't have to wait for a reply. I put it in file tags thinking that when somebody posts file contents it will often be long, so file tags will use a overflow div for scrollbars.

So it seems that you think the block of text is long, but the FreeBSD Forums software doesn't think it is long at all.

But you can still see it is a different color to ignore it if you want.


Anyway I didn't want to waste the bandwidth quota on a new FreeBSD disc unless other people know that power cut is okay for filesystem these days (that's because I don't think FreeBSD can use the same filesystems that linux uses (JFS/XFS)).


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## SirDice (Dec 14, 2009)

whathappen said:
			
		

> Yes it does, that is why I am considering it for this. What I don't want is this:
> 
> Everyone is standing around saying "come on put the music back on. Come on the power has come back already. Come on sing us a song." While I'm doing google searches on a mobile phone and typing away on a single user console. You get the idea?


In about 10 years of using FreeBSD this has happened to me maybe twice. Mainly because of my own faults/ignorance.

Treat your system like a baby, keep it clean and healthy. If you have frequent power-outs invest in a UPS, not a diffent OS. A filesystem can get seriously screwed up when this happens. Besides, non of the linux filesystems will help you if you have that many power-outs. So even then you'll be googling away trying to fix your system.



> Maybe it is a linux-only thing then. noatime is No Access Time, it means mount the filesystem with the option that says not to update the last access timestamp on files as they are read. atime updates mean even if you are only reading, the metadata is writing...


The only reason why you'll ever want to turn this off is for performance reasons. And yes, UFS allows you to turn if off. See mount(8), search for noatime.


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## whathappen (Dec 14, 2009)

> If you have frequent power-outs invest in a UPS, not a diffent OS.


Yeah, sounds wise and a UPS would be the proper way of doing it, I just don't want to spend the money 
Anyway I can't use the old OS it won't talk to my pioneer dvd burners. And I just don't want to use windows for this.

Been reading the manual this whole time, it seems that if I reserve a journal partition for every other partition I use and then use gjournal to set the journaling up, and then I'll be set.



> The only reason why you'll ever want to turn this off is for performance reasons


But what if the power goes off while the filesystem is flushing the updated disc block that contained the new access time metadata, everything else stored in that same disk block would get corrupted too.

Then I think about booting and running with a read-only root and /usr and all writable locations (/tmp /var I'd guess) as separate partitions.

It's because all it needs to be able to do is run X and a gui music player (nice news about nvidia drivers too, as I will be using AMD64 platform of course), and read music files, and have a place where I can write text files to record notes on missing request songs and the like. Those notes would probably go in a writeable home directory on it's own partition, I think that X or gui apps or wm's or something likes to write files to your home directory during execution too. Sounds interesting to set up. :\


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## SirDice (Dec 14, 2009)

You worry to much about things you don't need to worry about.

As I've said, I've been using FreeBSD for 10 years now, both as a server and as a workstation. I've never had any real problems with the filesystems.


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## graudeejs (Dec 14, 2009)

whathappen said:
			
		

> Maybe it is a linux-only thing then. noatime is No Access Time, it means mount the filesystem with the option that says not to update the last access timestamp on files as they are read. atime updates mean even if you are only reading, the metadata is writing...


No, I know what atime is.... and probably most users in this forum use it....



			
				whathappen said:
			
		

> Anyway I didn't want to waste the bandwidth quota on a new FreeBSD disc unless other people know that power cut is okay for filesystem these days (that's because I don't think FreeBSD can use the same filesystems that linux uses (JFS/XFS)).



One thing is to use, other is to use correctly


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## oliverh (Dec 14, 2009)

There is one huge problem with FreeBSD and the common terms stability and reliability: it depends. It depends on your hardware as in Linux and any other operating system. But the chance to get less support for certain motherboard chipsets (see e.g. nVidia in FreeBSD) etc. is way higher in FreeBSD than in Linux. So you have to be very picky while choosing your hardware for FreeBSD. But then you'll get a rock-stable operating system (compared at least to ArchLinux, Slackware for example would be a different story).


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## graudeejs (Dec 14, 2009)

I very much suggest using zfs if, you have at least 2G ram [I have 2.5G]


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## oliverh (Dec 14, 2009)

I second that. But it's a performance-wise consideration - it literally flies compared to UFS2. That said, UFS2+SU will be always an example for the term 'rock-stable'.


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## Dru (Dec 14, 2009)

meh.....Uninterruptible power supply not included


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## Beastie (Dec 14, 2009)

whathappen said:
			
		

> I am currently using a cheap ($70 AUD) asus am2+ motherboard along with a phenom x3 CPU and 2 gigs of RAM.





			
				whathappen said:
			
		

> Yeah, sounds wise and a UPS would be the proper way of doing it, I just don't want to spend the money


That's just reckless IMO. Sh*t happens even with Windows, even with GNU/Linux. It doesn't mean you *always* lose data, but it *can and does happen*.
It's a desktop machine, right? You can get a small 15-minutes UPS for maybe half the price of that MoBo or just a little more.


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## hedwards (Dec 14, 2009)

I got my current UPS for $50 if I remember correctly. And I've yet to have a single hard disk go out on me since then. You probably don't need one that can keep the system going for more than a few minutes, just long enough to close the programs and execute a graceful shut down.

SATA hasn't been dodgy in quite a while, or at least I haven't had any trouble with it in the last year. The USB can't be a bit of a pain, but that's mostly because the manufacturers don't care about making a proper implementation.

On a side note, I haven't tried Arch, but from past experience with Linux you probably don't want it doing all those sorts of recovery things for you. I've just had to reinstall far too many times because of corruption to the filesystem. FreeBSD at least lets you correct the problems in a sane fashion in most cases without trashing the files.


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## wonslung (Dec 14, 2009)

whathappen said:
			
		

> Good, thanks. This is the sort of thing that I was asking about. I expected people to say "oh no, don't ever do that. If you cut the power your drive will surely be corrupted, especially with ZFS."



ZFS is amazing.  I've got a server which has had the power cut several times and it never has a problem, unlike linux which would have to resync every single time.

the way zfs handles writes makes it where power failures aren't really an issue.  It's COW so it doesn't need a journal, it doesn't need to resync in raid modes and it just works.


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## zeiz (Dec 16, 2009)

I use same cheap Asus M3N78-VM (amd2+) with AthlonX2 (4450e) 2.3GHz, 4GB ram, onboard graphic (GeForce8200). FreeBSD runs amazingly (both i386 and amd64). I had 2 power cuts and nothing happened (fsck for max but I forgot).
Another machine is 7 y.o. Asus P4S333c (latest bios-beta 2003) with P4 2.4GHz, 2.5GB ram and GeForce3-Ti200. Win7 crashes all the time but FreeBSD (6,7,8,9-curr) runs like a charm.


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