Software Update: FreeNAS 8.3.0-RC1

A release candidate of FreeNAS version 8.3.0 has been released. With this package, a computer included in the network can be used as ‘network attached storage’, so purely for storing data. The whole is based on FreeBSD and provided with a clear web interface. Where the system requirements in version 7 were still very low and it could run fine on an old computer, there is slightly more extensive hardware for version 8 required. FreeNAS 8.3.0 is based on FreeBSD 8.3 p3 and includes a newer version of zfs.

Release Notes for FreeNAS 8.3.0-RC1

• FreeNAS 8.3.0-BETA1 has the FreeBSD base system switched to FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE-p3. The most noticable affect of this change is the inclusion of ZFS version 28, but there are a number of other driver changes as well.
• The mps driver for 6gbps LSI SAS HBAs is version 13, which requires phase 13 firmware on the controller. This is a hard requirement, running older firmware can cause many woes, including the failure to probe all of the attached disks, which can lead to degraded or unavailable arrays.
• ZFS v28 includes deduplication, which can be enabled at the dataset level. The more data you write to a deduplicated volume the more memory it requires, and there is no upper bound on this. When the system starts storing the dedup tables on disk because they no longer fit in RAM, performance craters. There is no way to undedup data once it is deduplicated, simply switching dedup off has NO AFFECT on the existing data. Furthermore, importing an unclean pool can require between 3-5GB of RAM per TB of deduped data, and if the system doesn’t have the needed RAM it will panic, with the only solution being adding more RAM or recreating the pool. Think carefully before enabling dedup! Then after thinking about it use compression instead.
• There is no need to upgrade your plugin jail or plugins if you are upgrading from FreeNAS 8.2.0-RELEASE-p1. If you do upgrade the plugin jail the plugins installed in that jail may be lost.
• The GUI upgrade format changed in 8.2.0-BETA3 from xz to txz. What this means is that if you are attempting to do a GUI upgrade to 8.3.0-BETA1 from 8.2.0-BETA3 or later use the .txz version of the GUI_Upgrade file. If you are upgrading from any previous version use the .xz file.
• The image size increased in 8.0.1-BETA3. The new size requires a 2 GB storage device. The GUI upgrade can be used to upgrade a system from 8.0.1-BETA3or later but upgrades from earlier releases than 8.0.1-BETA3 can only be done from the CD. The other option is to save the config, reinstall the new version, then restore the config.
• FreeBSD can be really touchy with hardware. Please be sure to update your BIOS/BMC firmware when upgrading / installing FreeNAS if you run into OS hang issues. There have been cases identified where a BIOS upgrade has fixed driver hangs, and/or other issues with FreeNAS; one such example was with an Intel 82578DC motherboard, as noted in the FreeNAS 8 forum thread titled “8.0.3-RELEASE coming soon..”: , post #70-88. Again, please only do this if you experience booting / runtime issues, as some vendors don’t test FreeBSD interoperability as much as others between major firmware releases.
• Previous builds were branded as i386/amd64 (32-bit and 64-bit respectively). 8.0.3-RC1+ rebranded the architectures as x86 and x64, respectively.
• 8.0.1 and 8.0.2 images advertised CIFS shares to Macs by default but 8.0.3 and later images don’t advertise CIFS shares by default. If you want to advertise CIFS shares in 8.0.3 and later, be sure to turn on “Zeroconf” support in the CIFS global settings.
• Builds prior to 8.0.3-RELEASE with ‘CIFS’ didn’t actually have AIO (asynchronous I/O) enabled. So, if you experience performance degradation after upgrading from prior versions of FreeNAS to 8.0.3-RELEASE or newer, turn off AIO or tune the AIO size from ‘1’ to something more reasonable (the new default in 8.0.3-RELEASE- p1 is 4096 or 4kB).

FreeNAS 8.0 screenshot, click on the image for a larger version.