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

[jacob]

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.

I don't think it's a big loss if the open SPARC ecosystem didn't take off. SPARC processors like several others are famous for their sliding register window which sounds like a cool feature on paper but can turn out to be a real b!tch in real world code.

[Volta]

I tried the new rfelease of Open Indianna Hipster and i was surprised at how much RAM it was using compared to an equivalent Linux desktop.
Does anyone know why OI Hipster is so RAM thirsty?

It was called slowlaris for a reason.

[pracedru]

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.

I don't think it is the case that ZFS is the cause of this. That is my point.
I guess a simple way to test it would be to install libreoffice on a linux distro that uses ZFS.

[skeevy420]

I don't think it is the case that ZFS is the cause of this. That is my point.
I guess a simple way to test it would be to install libreoffice on a linux distro that uses ZFS.

Based on the numbers you posed, I think it'd be safe to assume that ZFS was the culprit. What you described and posted is how it is supposed to act. It just seems counter-intuitive if you come from the "I need every ounce of ram free when idle" mindset. I suppose running Ubuntu ZFS and doing the same things could test that theory out.

jacob While Ubuntu is pushing ZFS, no one else is adopting Zsys so almost everything Ubuntu does in regards to ZFS stays in-house. That sucks because Zsys is actually pretty nice and has a lot more potential than as just an Ubuntu thing. But more on topic, other distributions won't pick ZFS up because they're already invested in other tech. I doubt that the license is a factor in distributions picking ZFS or not. If that was the case then distributions wouldn't ship Nvidia drivers on install disks.

Red Hat has Stratis and other things that they're working on. SUSE is a firm BTRFS backer. So is Fedora. Debian doesn't back anything but it might as well be Ext4. Of the major players, all that's left is Ubuntu and they're using it. It just sucks that they're using it in an in-house manner that no one else seems to want to pick up...not even their alternates like Mint or KDE Neon (@ngraham *hint hint*) are using it.

By the time ZoL was ready for mainstream, most of the major distributions were invested in something else and Ubuntu wasn't. I think that's the simplest explanation of them all.

The problem with ZFS is there's a lot of demand for ZFS storage with minimal demand for ZFS as root. That's why almost every distribution has ZFS storage disk support and it's possible to install most of them to a ZFS root if one is determined enough. The demand is obviously there else it wouldn't be so easy to install everywhere. The problem is long term ZFS root maintenance. That can be a total motherfscker. Seems like only Ubuntu's Zsys is trying to tackle that on Linux in a mainstream, compatible for everyone, manner.

I feel like I'm talking in circles here so, yeah, that's my speculation on it all.

[pracedru]

Based on the numbers you posed, I think it'd be safe to assume that ZFS was the culprit.

The reason why i don't think it is the case is because i had originally provisioned the VM with 2 GB RAM and tried to install GIMP.
The installation process was killed because process went out of memory. I then added 2GB RAM to the machine and tried installing Libreoffice. It took forever to install and i notived that it began swapping memory to disk. This would not be the case had it been a cache issue.

[cretin1997]

No it's not ZFS everyone. The real reason is here:

https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/Tf485390ebc9d5df2/there-is-something-inherently-wrong-with-this-system

I only registered to point you to the right answer. ZFS is not to blame here, guys.

[skeevy420]

The reason why i don't think it is the case is because i had originally provisioned the VM with 2 GB RAM and tried to install GIMP.
The installation process was killed because process went out of memory. I then added 2GB RAM to the machine and tried installing Libreoffice. It took forever to install and i notived that it began swapping memory to disk. This would not be the case had it been a cache issue.

While it might not be, I still think ZFS is at fault. 2GB had crashing. 4GB had caching. I'm no rocket scientist but that seems like ZFS memory issues at play.

With 4GB I'd limit the arc to 1GB of ram or just add 1-2GB of ram to the VM since I don't think the 4GB+1GB per TB suggestion accounts for OS memory. Every time I read that suggestion I wonder to myself "Is that in addition to the ram my system already has?" so I'd err on the side of caution and play it safe with a 6GB minimum. That should be enough to cover ZFS and the OS. You might want more ram on a Linux OS since systemd likes to gank ram for tmpfs.

2-4GB is really pushing it with ZFS. I can't stress that enough. If this was a video game those are the specs where you'd have to be opening config files to do outside of the game tweaks to get it to run better.

To be frank, I've never ran ZFS with less than 32GB of system ram available or in a VM ever. I love ZFS and promote it all the time, but there's a time and a place for ext4 and a VM with only 2-4GB ram is one of them unless you're doing ZFS memory pressure testing. Every PC I've owned in the past 10 years has had 32GB or more ram so I've never ran into ZFS out of memory swap issues and I prefer to stick to the VM's image format or simpler file systems like ext3 and 4.

I checked and Ubuntu says 2GB of free memory is enough to use ZFS but suggests using it in a system with no less than 8GB.

[cb88]

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.

Yeah even in Linux 4GB is what I'd call bare minimum for "comfort" and if I do much... I'll run out. If you have 4GB + 4TB of drives which isn't atypical these days then you are pressying real hard up against the limits of ZFS, its designed for machines with 64GB+

[pracedru]

Yeah even in Linux 4GB is what I'd call bare minimum for "comfort" and if I do much... I'll run out. If you have 4GB + 4TB of drives which isn't atypical these days then you are pressying real hard up against the limits of ZFS, its designed for machines with 64GB+

I agree that 4GB RAM might be in the low end for many Linux desktops, if you need it for something productive.
But just running a desktop and installing a program like Libreoffice with a package manager should definitely be possible with 2 GB RAM. As you can see from the results of my test it also went just fine on the F34 Mate box, as it peaked at < 1GB RAM consumed. The installation consumed only about 150 MB RAM extra on F34 while on Open Indianna it consumed an extra 2400 MB RAM.

I am definitely not saying that it isn't ZFS, but it seems unlikely to me.

[cb88]

I agree that 4GB RAM might be in the low end for many Linux desktops, if you need it for something productive.
But just running a desktop and installing a program like Libreoffice with a package manager should definitely be possible with 2 GB RAM. As you can see from the results of my test it also went just fine on the F34 Mate box, as it peaked at < 1GB RAM consumed. The installation consumed only about 150 MB RAM extra on F34 while on Open Indianna it consumed an extra 2400 MB RAM.

I am definitely not saying that it isn't ZFS, but it seems unlikely to me.

How big is your disk... you never said. Also OI isn't tuned for your setup... its tuned for sytems with 64-256GB+ ram as a norm, and has already been said it can be tuned for your system it just requires doing so.

Solaris has a history of being considered "heavy" but that is becasue it is tuned to run on large systems mostly not because of bloat.