FreeBSD GJournal (Filesystem Journal)

Freebsd 7.0 has a new geom extenstion called gjournal. You can easily create a journaled filesystem with gjournal on bsd systems.
First of all, gjournal support has to be built in kernel. It's currently built in 7.x series. The kernel option is called UFS_GJOURNAL

You should disable soft updates on filesystems where gjournal is used. Because journalling takes place and there is no need to use soft updates for data recovery on a crash.

While the filesystem is journalled, the mount option async will boost the performance.


For example, let's say we have a disk called ad1 and it has existing filesystem on it.

All we have to do is create a label.

# gjournal label -f /dev/ad1

notice the -f option. It will force convert operation of an existing file system to journal. Journal device will be separate and called in this example as /dev/ad1.journal.

now it's time to load geom gjournal kernel module.

# gjournal load

now add journalling support to our existing filesystem.

# tunefs -J enable /dev/ad1.journal

it's better now to disable soft updates.

# tunefs -n disable /dev/ad1.journal


now we mount our new journalled filesystem with async option.

# mount -o asyn /dev/ad1.journal /mnt

in our example, we don't have any slices on our disk. In slice case new devices will be created (eg. /dev/ad1s1.journal)