Re: ZFS status wrt FreeBSD, (open)solaris.

[Chavdar Ivanov <ci4ic4%gmail.com@localhost>]

2010/1/3 George Michaelson <geeohgeegeeoh%gmail.com@localhost>:
>
> To reply to my own mail, for anyone who is interested:
>
>
> Opensolaris:    very sensitive to BIOS/platform. can't get to boot (yet)
>                 on the pc, still testing. Zo NFI how ZFS works on this 
> platform.

Yet to see reasonably recent PC not being able to boot OpenSolaris.
Disagree with the comment about the BIOS sensitivity. Probably some
consumer-grade motherboards will have trouble, but I steer away from
them as a rule (Tyan S2915, S2887, S2927, S5396, ASUS P6T all are fine
Solaris workhorses here; Intel is the second-biggest OpenSolaris
contributor, so generally anything recent and decent Intel-based
works).

>
> FreeBSD:        very fast initial ZFS state. signs it slows down over time.
>                alas, unstable on SMP on my host and cannot force the BIOS
>                or the kernel to single-CPU mode yet, so not able to test
>                in depth. However, wrt ZFS:
>

I've had enough problems with FreeBSD since 6.2 (the one server I
still maintain in the office is still on 6.0, rock-solid, though). I
prepare the machines nowadays first on ESX4i, XenServer 5.5 or
(mainly) VirtualBox; various problems on all of them for FreeBSD 8.0,
so I still do not have it running on real hardware. I did test ZFS on
an early beta, though; it seems to work for the brief test. As soon as
I get some spare hardware around, I might go through one more FreeBSD
test cycle.

>                ZFS version 13, fully documented,
>                including cache disk. bootable zfs via gptboot in boot1 phase
>
> NetBSD:         unable to load solaris;

Do you expect NetBSD boot loader to be able to load OpenSolaris off a
ZFS pool? I don't think so. Correct me if I am wrong. Of course,
OpenSolaris GRUB is perfectly capable of loading NetBSD.

> load zfs in boot.cfg (dies in ACPI
>                initialization) so still depending on runtime modload of the 
> code.
>                slower than FreeBSD, deadlocks periodically. died during
>                dump/restore pipe, locked user processes doing rsync copies,
>                hangs at reboot with unable to unmount state(s)

While I was happy to see ZFS fairly quickly in NetBSD, my observations
are similar; I have never discussed them, as they were again on a
VirtualBox  machine.


>
>                ZFS version 14. documentation still a bit weak,
>                nothing on cache disk usage, not apparently bootable.
>
> I'm continuing to play, the think I most want to do next is get a zpool 
> export to
> work and see if I can zpool import into FreeBSD, and of course get Opensolaris
> to boot on my PC (I think its USB keyboard recognition)

Any more information? Motherboard, NerBSD dmesg from the same box etc.

>
> NetBSD ZFS is very clearly labelled 'experimental' so its all 'caveat emptor'.

Yes...

>
> Hats off to the GSoC coder(s) and others, its really sweet to have it working 
> this
> much, still more to do I think (around the locking/resource consumption/speed 
> for sure)

Hear, hear...

>
> -G

If ZFS is what you want to test/use, stick to OpenSolaris (and that is
all now what is being developed now, Nevada builds have been
terminated with snv_130 expected to be the last). I've switched all my
Solaris boxes to OpenSolaris now (with one exception still at snv_128
due to missing Adaptec driver on OpenSolaris).

Chavdar Ivanov
-- 
----
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