From: Jim Seymour (jseymour@linxnet.com)
Date: Sat Jan 19 2008 - 18:26:17 EST
Original question:
>
> Environment:
>
> Sun Sparc Solaris 8 Generic_108528-29 on an E250
> Infortrend EonStor 1.4TB RAID 5, U320 SCSI host connection
>
> When I go to "newfs" the filesystems, I'm getting
>
> Warning: insufficient space in super block for rotational
> layout tables with nsect sblock.fs_nsect and
> ntraksblock.fs_ntrak. (File system performance may be
> impaired.)
>
> I've searched and searched, and can find nothing more than what
> "man mkfs_ufs" offers, by way of explanation:
>
> Occurs typically on very high density disks. On
> such disks, the file system structure cannot
> encode the proper disk layout information, result-
> ing in suboptimal performance.
>
> So the question is: Is this really an issue with a RAID 5 storage
> array? A colleague of mine, explaining what the "rotational layout
> table" is and how it's used, suggests not. He suggests that, even if
> there would be an impact, it would only affect very large files.
> (Files that would span more than a cylinder group?) In any event: It
> doesn't appear I can do anything about it. (Other than shrinking the
> RAID 5 partitions.)
The Resolution:
I did even more digging. The only answer that came up more than once
was "Solaris doesn't like more than 64 heads." (I think I was just too
tired and too wired last night for that to have sunk in.)
So off to the office I went. I re-configured the Infortrend EonStor's
host configuration to tell the host the array had 64 heads (cylinders
ended-up somewhere around 36k and sectors ended-up 255, IIRC) and the
problem was solved.
No more "insufficient space in super block" messages from mkfs_ufs.
As a bonus: No more "num sector(s) in last cylinder group unallocated"
messages, either :).
Fsck'd all the devices after newfs'ing them. Cloned a couple of the
smaller filesystems over to the new array (using star) and re-fsck'd
and ran a file-by-file compare between source and destination on one of
them. All appears to be solid.
Thanks to Ric Anderson and Anthony D'Atri for their replies.
Regards,
Jim
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