Star OpenSolaris: Shows Promise, Needs Work
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 15th May 2008 16:28 UTC
Sun Solaris, OpenSolaris 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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Weeman
Member since:
2006-03-20

The ZFS ARC is the new Superfetch.

Try to understand this:

If your memory isn't used by applications, ZFS uses it for caching.

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sbergman27 Member since:
2005-07-24

If your memory isn't used by applications, ZFS uses it for caching.

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

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Thom_Holwerda Member since:
2005-06-29

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!


That's unreasonable, Steve. You're making it seem as if ZFS is some sort of another FAT32 - but that's ridiculous. It offers A LOT of advanced features, and those features come at a price. You are always free to choose another less advanced filesystem.

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kaiwai Member since:
2005-07-06

"If your memory isn't used by applications, ZFS uses it for caching.

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! "

I don't know who said the 32bit thing, because I've got it running on a Dimension 8400 w/ 2.5GB ram very nicely.

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Weeman Member since:
2006-03-20

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".


When someone says that, it's referring to the recommendations for running traditional Solaris with ZFS, both in their intended scenarios, the enterprise. Since those were the only real available "metrics", they've been parrotted all across the web.

As far as 64bit goes, ZFS is faster in 64bit mode because the various checksum and parity algorithms work faster in that mode. Remember that everything's checksummed left and right.

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Robert Escue Member since:
2005-07-08

I don't see any significant memory utilization on my Pentium IV machine, and I created a ZFS mirror of the rpool (root) disk using the two 250 GB drives I have installed in the machine. Something I might have to investigate when I get home.

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kragil Member since:
2006-01-04

Well, the whole system was super slow. Starting simple application took ages. I guess if you have less than 1.5 GB of RAM you can forget about doing anything usefull with ZFS.

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