Last week, on my country's Liberation Day, Sun released OpenSolaris 2008.05, the much awaited first official fruit of Project Indiana. It delivers many of OpenSolaris' major features, such as DTrace, ZFS, containers, and more, in a Linux distribution-like package. The goal is to allow more people to experience Solaris. A few reviews have since hit the web.
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Member since:2006-03-20
Member since:2005-07-24
Linux has that philosophy, and I think it is a good one. But what I keep hearing about ZFS is: "Don't use ZFS with less than 2GB of memory, or on 32 bit hardware. And if you do try it don't complain".
I find that shocking. I have used OpenSolaris 2008.05 and it performed just fine. But I have 2GB of RAM and 64 bit hardware. I would never have expected to have to worry about filesystem memory requirements, for the gods' sake!
Edited 2008-05-15 18:13 UTC
Member since:2006-01-04
Member since:2006-02-10
OpenSoloaris uses more than 768 mb of RAM after booting into Gnome. It may have great features .. but it is not yet ready for the real world.
Unused RAM is wasted money. I prefer my RAM doing something useful, like a good ZFS file cache. That said, ZFS probably isn't very helpful to any system with less than 1Gb RAM, but RAM is cheap, so this isn't a problem on any remotely recent hardware.
Member since:2006-01-19
My position on this is probably unpopular, but here goes:
I do not care how much memory an OS appears to use, period, as long as it allows me to address what I've got.
I think this because:
* 8 GB of registered ECC server RAM is less than $750 these days and 8 GB of desktop ram is probably $200.
* Actually sorting out the difference is pretty tough; RAM usage numbers for the OS are not directly comparable in Solaris or 2003 or Vista or RHEL3 or RHEL4--they report different metrics. Figuring it out is possible if you are very careful, but most of us looking at TEH FREE RAM!! don't actually know what it means in a given instance, or how that would translate to another OS.
So I look it this way: If you are not swapping, you are OK. If you are, and you can fit more ram, get it. If you can't fit more, well, that's why they pay us the medium bucks--you need to change some element of the solution.
What does upset me is the Microsoft solution, artificially capping ram addressing on 32 bit platforms. Asking people to pay an extra $3k for Enterprise, just to turn on PAE and address the RAM they already own, is asking too much for my taste.
OK RAM misers, I've vacated the soapbox, now flame away like it's 1995! 
Member since:2005-07-24
Member since:2005-07-08
Just how are you measuring how much memory is being used? Try this (as root) to see your actual utilization:
mdb -k
At the :: prompt type memstat and you should see a display like this:
robert@apophis:~# mdb -k
Loading modules: [ unix genunix specfs dtrace cpu.generic cpu_ms.AuthenticAMD.15 uppc pcplusmp scsi_vhci zfs random ip hook neti sctp arp usba uhci s1394 lofs audiosup sppp ptm ipc ]
> ::memstat
Page Summary Pages MB %Tot
------------ ---------------- ---------------- ----
Kernel 96724 377 30%
Anon 38710 151 12%
Exec and libs 11827 46 4%
Page cache 1229 4 0%
Free (cachelist) 5139 20 2%
Free (freelist) 171633 670 53%
Total 325262 1270
Physical 325261 1270
>
To exit mdb, use Ctrl-D. The results I just posted is the current state of my Gateway laptop with an Athlon 64 CPU and 1.25 GB of memory.
Member since:
2006-01-04
.. outside of Richmond.
OpenSoloaris uses more than 768 mb of RAM after booting into Gnome. It may have great features .. but it is not yet ready for the real world.