PC Engines apu2 experiences

Vollans

@kevindd992002 Better resilience if you have a crash. UFS has a horrid habit of collapsing in an unrecoverable heap, ZFS is far more likely to recover gracefully.

Qinn

@kevindd992002 said in PC Engines apu2 experiences:

Without doing manual snapshots, is there an advantage of using ZFS over the old UFS? I am on ZFS on a single SSD and I forgot what its advantage is when I posted here a few years ago.

....of course RAID with ZFS gives more redundancy, best is more disks using RAID. As the problem with a single disk and "copies" is the same as creating an mdadm raid-1 using two partitions of the same disk: you have data redundancy, but not disk redundancy, as disk failure will cause the loss of both data sets.

Comparing UFS with ZFS, well ZFS, like btrfs, is copy-on-write, so power surges are never a problem and ZFS requires a system with ECC memory (APU2 has this), otherwise you're still not 100% safeguarded against bit errors.

logan5247

@vollans Sorry to keep asking questions.

) If I snapshot zroot do I need to snapshot zroot/ROOT and zroot/ROOT/default? Does zroot not include everything else?

Let's say I did a snapshot, made a change, and successfully rolled back:

zfs rollback zroot/var@20210308
zfs rollback zroot/ROOT/default@20210308
zfs rollback zroot/ROOT@20210308
zfs rollback zroot@20210308
shutdown -r now

And now my zfs list looks like this (after the rollback):

NAME                          USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
zroot                         674M  12.4G    96K  /zroot
zroot@20210308                   0      -    96K  -
zroot/ROOT                    665M  12.4G    96K  none
zroot/ROOT@20210308              0      -    96K  -
zroot/ROOT/default            665M  12.4G   665M  /
zroot/ROOT/default@20210308   388K      -   665M  -
zroot/tmp                     144K  12.4G   144K  /tmp
zroot/var                    7.02M  12.4G  6.62M  /var
zroot/var@20210308            400K      -  6.62M  -

How do I know what set of filesystems I'm running on? Is there something like an "active" marker in zfs list?

VAMike

@logan5247 this really should get its own zfs thread, it has nothing to do with the apu2

Vollans

@vamike I agree, but quickly in summary, you're always running the one without the @ sign - that's the current live version. You can see that the size of the "backup" of zroot is nothing. The size of zroot/ROOT/default's backup is bigger. zroot doesn't include the other, effectively, "partitions".

Qinn

@dem said in PC Engines apu2 experiences:

@vollans I did a quick test in a virtual machine to figure out what the commands would be. This appears to work:

On a running 2.4.5-p1 system:
zpool checkpoint zroot
Booted from the 2.5.0 installer and in the Rescue Shell:
zpool import -f -N --rewind-to-checkpoint zroot
zpool export zroot
poweroff

I would like to know how you booted from the 2.5.0 installer using a virtual pfsense machine and got to the Rescue Shell?

dem

@qinn In VirtualBox I put the file pfSense-CE-2.5.0-RELEASE-amd64.iso in the virtual optical drive and booted to this screen, where I selected Rescue Shell:

Qinn

@dem Thanks for the quick reply, I understand that.
What I would like to know is how you get to the Virtual pfSense from here as the virtual pfsense machine is not running and access the checkpoint you made?

Btw I am using VM workstation!

dem

@qinn Sorry I wasn't clear: I put the installer image into the virtual optical drive of the same virtual pfSense instance that I checkpointed, so the installer has access to the same virtual disk and can locate the checkpointed zroot pool.

Edited to add: My goal was to simulate booting an apu2 from the memstick image in order to rewind a checkpoint, but I don't have a spare apu2 to test with. If I actually ran pfSense in a virtual machine I would use virtual machine snapshots before any upgrade.

VAMike

@qinn I never would have guessed this was somehow specific to the apu2

dem

@vamike It's not, but @vollans rolled back an upgrade of his apu2 using ZFS and that sparked interest in using ZFS to recover from a failed upgrade.

VAMike

@dem so he should start another thread so that people actually interested in apu2 experiences can find those without digging through unrelated zfs support questions

Vollans

@vamike I agreed it wasn't relevant here 2 days ago, and stopped responding.

sikita

Why pfsense 2.5 shows "AES-NI CPU Crypto: No" when in 2.4.x there was YES on APU2? Also on 2.5 there is in other line: Hardware crypto AES-CBC,AES-CCM,AES-GCM,AES-ICM,AES-XTS

bigsy

@sikita said in PC Engines apu2 experiences:

Why pfsense 2.5 shows "AES-NI CPU Crypto: No" when in 2.4.x there was YES on APU2?

Anything to do with this problem? If so, it appears to be fixed in 2.5.1.

sikita

@bigsy Ok, thank you. Seems to be GUI bug and does not involve using HW crypto.

Qinn

@sikita I am on pfSense 2.5.0 and here it says:

Firefox_Screenshot_2021-03-12T16-51-01.718Z.png

Do you have AES-NI enabled?

Qinn

Can anyone share there System / Advanced / Networking on a APU2

Mine are

Firefox_Screenshot_2021-03-19T11-29-42.923Z.png

as these are the defaults, grabbed them from a VM installation, which is not quit the same setup.

The old and not anymore recommend settings from https://teklager.se/en/knowledge-base/apu2-1-gigabit-throughput-pfsense/ are quit different!

...and there is a new settings present in 2.5.0. " hn ALTQ support"

Could anyone elaborate on all these or there settings?

stephenw10

There are no hn NICs on any APU so it makes no difference. You can disable it.

Steve

valnar

I performed all the bootloader and other tweaks mentioned in various threads throughout the years on my <= 2.45-p1 installation and now I don't remember what they all are. It would be great if somebody could post what things to look for (to remove?) when you update your apu2 from 2.4.5 --> 2.5.0.

At the moment because of the performance issues, I'm not upgrading.