Illumos Dropping SPARC, Allows For Newer Compiler + Eventual Use Of Rust In The Kernel

[lyamc]

btrfs is much better.

I guess people are going through all the effort of making ZFS work better with Linux because it's inferior?

[skeevy420]

Look I understand the sentiment.
But if your system with 4GB RAM is beginning to swap RAM to disk, when the only thing you are doing is installing libreoffice, then it is so bad that it is on the verge of being completely unusable.

Then limit ZFS's memory usage. That shouldn't be necessary with 4GB+ ram available. The FreeBSD recommended minimum is 4GB for comfortable use with most workloads and what you are experiencing is to be expected since ZFS should yield its used ram for the system.

I've read that in the past that 2GB is the ZoL extreme minimal a system should; FreeBSD says 1GB is extreme minimal (possibly with tuning); most places say 4GB+1GB per TB of ZFS storage is optimal.

[squash]

Unused RAM is wasted RAM. If ZFS hands memory back when free memory gets low, I don't see the problem. Linux does the same stuff, basically every file you open goes into cache, and cache is discarded when that memory is used for something more important. it's just when a Linux fs does it, it gets it's own buff/cache column in `free` and everyone knows that memory is still available.

             total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:       14329276     4521844     6571820      378292     3235612     9111812

[willbprog177]

Oh, I can't wait until I can run OpenIndiana, which uses the Illumos kernel, on my 2012 Mac mini. I like using OI, it's just very finicky hardware-wise. The developers and other contributors seem to be pretty nice and patient folks. That helps when you're trying to get help on weird issues -- you don't just get a "WONTFIX - CAN'T REPRODUCE" from them.

[jacob]

Another seat on the rust in the kernel bandwagon. I'll be interested in who will be the first to actually release it. My bet so far is on Windows, MS has been talking about it for a while now and seems to be the furthest down that road of all major OSes.

[skeevy420]

Another seat on the rust in the kernel bandwagon. I'll be interested in who will be the first to actually release it. My bet so far is on Windows, MS has been talking about it for a while now and seems to be the furthest down that road of all major OSes.

Technically speaking, Redox beat all of them to it.

[jacob]

Technically speaking, Redox beat all of them to it.

Technically yes, but it's an experimental system. I was talking about mainstream established OSes: Windows, Linux and I guess Illumos qualifies too. The one still missing is Macos. The BSDs aren't going to happen IMHO for various reasons.

[jacob]

Oh yes, going to a lot of effort necessarily guarantees that it must be worthwhile. Impeccable logic...

Linus' recent comments about ZFS were bang on the money—most of the "demand" for ZFS on Linux (or on any platform for that matter) is due to marketing and hype; not technical excellence. ZFS is a decidedly mediocre and inflexible filesystem.

Is there actually some significant "demand"? Ubuntu was trying to push it without much buy-in AFAICT and that's about it.

[CommunityMember]

Outside of ZFS, Solaris really didn't bring much to the table.

Dtrace? Solaris Zones?

[kylew77]

Sparc was always the more interesting piece of the Sun pie, even if it was often poorly executed. Outside of ZFS, Solaris really didn't bring much to the table. They gradually added features that their competitors had for years and while it wasn't a "bad" OS it was almost always quite uninteresting.

Sparc on the other hand was an early adopter of 64 bit architectures (1995!), so early in fact they had to disable it on their first gen of products because of a cpu bug that would easily grant root. These days, everyone has 64 bit.

They took multicore/multtithread to a new level with their Niagara in 2005, with an 8 core 32 thread monster at 1.4ghz. Of course they shared some unfortunate components such as a single FPU for the entire chip, giving single core comparable performance to a 2 generation prior 450mhz UltraSparc IIe, but if you had an easy job like compiling, service static files over web or nfs, it was a monster. These days everyone does multicore+multithread but 32 threads on a single chip in 2005 was revolutionary.

UltraSparc IV would scale up to 72 sockets, up to 144 cores and half a terabyte or RAM, in 2005... Sure the previous generation could house more physical processors but they were single core, so this was a good jump. This scale of beast required a full 6 foot rack, giving you a level of cpu/memory capacity we can today fit easily into 1U... But in 2005 that was a massive system capable of running a single operating system rather than as a cluster.

Ultrasparc V and up were essentially Fujitsu products that Oracle happened to also sell, with notable improvements in 2012 and 2014, after which Fujitsu announced they were moving to ARM instead of doing Oracle's work for them.

I wondered what happened to Fujitsu's SPARC64 processors, they sounded like real beasts like POWER 8 and maybe even POWER9 equivalents, of course AMD has turned the world on its head with 128 core systems in 2 socket systems but before that 4 way SMT was impressive to say the least.