[gentoo-user] Report: Experience with f2fs

[Peter Humphrey]

Some list members might be interested in how I've got on with f2fs 
(flash-friendly file system).

According to genlop I first installed f2fs on my Atom mini-server box on 
1/11/14 (that's November, for the benefit of transpondians), but I'm 
pretty sure it must have been several months before that. I installed a 
SanDisk SDSSDP-064G-G25 in late February last year and my admittedly 
fallible memory says I changed to f2fs not many months after that, as 
soon as I discovered it.

Until two or three weeks ago I had no problems at all. Then while doing 
a routine backup tar started complaining about files having been moved 
before it could copy them. It seems I had a copy of an /etc directory 
from somewhere (perhaps a previous installation) under /root and some 
files when listed showed question marks in all fields except their 
names. I couldn't delete them, so I re-created the root partition and 
restored from a backup.

So far so good, but then I started getting strange errors last week. For 
instance, dovecot started throwing symbol-not-found errors. Finally, 
after remerging whatever packages failed for a few days, 
/var/log/messages suddenly appeared as a binary file again, and I'm 
pretty sure that bug's been fixed.

Time to ditch f2fs, I thought, so I created all partitions as ext4 and 
restored the oldest backup I still had, then ran emerge -e world and 
resumed normal operations. I didn't zero out the partitions with dd; 
perhaps I should have.

I'll watch what happens, but unless the SSD has failed after only a year 
I shouldn't have any problems.

An interesting experience. Why should f2fs work faultlessly for several 
months, then suffer repeated failures with no clear pattern?

-- 
Rgds
Peter.