A Look At The HAMMER2 File-System Performance With DragonFlyBSD 5.2

Written by Michael Larabel in Storage on 14 April 2018 at 06:30 PM EDT. Page 1 of 2. 9 Comments.

With this week's release of DragonFlyBSD 5.2 this popular BSD operating system is promoting its own HAMMER2 file-system as stable. As a result, here are a few fresh benchmarks of HAMMER vs. HAMMER2 on DragonFlyBSD 5.2 while more tests are forthcoming.

HAMMER2 received many improvements during the DragonFlyBSD 5.2 development cycle to the point where they now recommend HAMMER2 as the default root file-system for non-clustered systems; the clustered mode for HAMMER2 is yet to be implemented.

On Phoronix we have been covering the HAMMER2 file-system since its inception back in 2012 and have been benchmarking it more recently since it became a fairly viable choice in DragonFlyBSD 5.0. HAMMER2 is a clean sheet design and supports online deduplication, snapshots, LZ4/Zlib compression, encryption, and other features. Our tests have been positive and in the testing of DragonFlyBSD 5.0 and 5.2 we have yet to lose any data to this file-system led by DragonFly lead developer Matthew Dillon.

I ran some I/O benchmarks this weekend of DragonFlyBSD 5.2-RELEASE on an Intel Xeon E3-1280 v5 system with a 256GB Toshiba RD400 NVMe SSD. More tests of DragonFlyBSD 5.2 with HAMMER2 on other storage devices and systems will be coming up on Phoronix in the future, as well as comparing the performance to FreeBSD/TrueOS with ZFS and Linux with its popular EXT4/XFS/Btrfs/F2FS file-system options. For these tests though it's just a look when cleanly installing DragonFlyBSD 5.2 with HAMMER and then again with HAMMER2 on this Xeon server backed by NVMe SSD storage. All of these benchmarks were facilitated via the Phoronix Test Suite.


Related Articles