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

[k1e0x]

"OMG ZFS uses so much memory."

False.

Yes, ZFS will consume every bit of free memory it can but it uses it as a cache, it releases that memory once a program needs it.. so in effect it makes efficient use of the hardware in your system. The filesystem can run with no memory cache at all like any other filesystem.

The reason Sun put "memory requirements" into the original documentation is because they wanted to guarantee a level of ZFS performance but yes, you can run ZFS just fine on a system with 128m of ram.

[jacob]

The problem with ZFS is there's a lot of demand for ZFS storage with minimal demand for ZFS as root.

Honestly I don't see a lot of demand for ZFS storage, in fact barely any demand at all. As you say, those who use Linux in production for massive storage (i.e. not Ubuntu, that's a cloud instance OS, we're talking mainly RedHat and SUSE) don't use ZFS. Ubuntu's effort to push ZoL was met with a massive shrug and the fact that you can do "apt-get install zfs" in Debian isn't changing the world either. From where I stand it seems to me that it's mainly the home NAS people who swear by ZFS but that's niche application and clearly not something that has any real impact on the development of Linux.

[k1e0x]

Honestly I don't see a lot of demand for ZFS storage, in fact barely any demand at all. As you say, those who use Linux in production for massive storage (i.e. not Ubuntu, that's a cloud instance OS, we're talking mainly RedHat and SUSE) don't use ZFS. Ubuntu's effort to push ZoL was met with a massive shrug and the fact that you can do "apt-get install zfs" in Debian isn't changing the world either. From where I stand it seems to me that it's mainly the home NAS people who swear by ZFS but that's niche application and clearly not something that has any real impact on the development of Linux.

In my experience sysadmins really like it. It's a competing platform to NetApp and I manage several ZFS pools now.

The trouble we have deploying more of it is that you can only really use it on FreeBSD or Solaris (rip) in live production. That has recently changed and you *can* run it in production on Linux with a commercially backed distro but that hasn't propagated down to enterprise level yet and storage arrays tend to live forever. FreeBSD is a fine OS but you need Linux as well if you want it everywhere because of service contracts.

So no, I think you're completely wrong. I think Ubuntu is making a very wise call here backing ZFS. There is nothing else you really can use that is open source. NetApp, EMC or DDN and... ZFS. that's pretty much it.

[pracedru]

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.

OpenIndianna markets them selves as suitable for desktops.

OpenIndiana is a community supported operating system, based on the illumos kernel and userland.

It is open source, free to use, and suitable for servers and desktops.

If what you are saying is true, that it is an issue with ZFS configuration, I think they should tweak their ZFS config for a somewhat smaller amount RAM. But better yet, their OS should detect the hardware that is available and use that for config.

[cb88]

OpenIndianna markets them selves as suitable for desktops.



If what you are saying is true, that it is an issue with ZFS configuration, I think they should tweak their ZFS config for a somewhat smaller amount RAM. But better yet, their OS should detect the hardware that is available and use that for config.

Who the heck puts only 4GB in a desktop these days? A distro doesn't have to be practicably tuned for retro hardware to be suitable for desktop.

[pracedru]

Who the heck puts only 4GB in a desktop these days? A distro doesn't have to be practicably tuned for retro hardware to be suitable for desktop.

My point still stands. 64-256GB+ ram is till a lot. My desktop has 32 GB RAM, so it wouldn't even apply.

[k1e0x]

My point still stands. 64-256GB+ ram is till a lot. My desktop has 32 GB RAM, so it wouldn't even apply.

I'm sure it's just cache usage. If not something is leaking memory. Do you actually see the kernel call OOM? (You know OOM works on Solaris, it won't crash like Linux does)

[cb88]

My point still stands. 64-256GB+ ram is till a lot. My desktop has 32 GB RAM, so it wouldn't even apply.

No your point doesn't really stand, 32GB is enough that tuning for large machines doesn't really affect you that much.

Go try and run a modern Linux distro on a machine with 128MB ram.... this was doable about 10 years ago its a moving target and Solaris's target is a bit bigger than what Linux typically targets as Oracle doesn't even make workstations.

[pracedru]

No your point doesn't really stand, 32GB is enough that tuning for large machines doesn't really affect you that much.

Go try and run a modern Linux distro on a machine with 128MB ram.... this was doable about 10 years ago its a moving target and Solaris's target is a bit bigger than what Linux typically targets as Oracle doesn't even make workstations.

But this is Open Indianna and Illumos and it is marketed as targeting desktops.

[pracedru]

This is an interesting subject, so I have decided to investigate further.
I have reinstalled Open Indianna Hipster in a VM. This time on Oracles Virtualbox instead of in KVM as last time.
I have decided to do a better analysis of the resource consumption while doing the previously mentioned task.
I updated the OS and installed the Guest additions.
After a reboot i started the installation of Libreoffice.
The Package manager started out with "refreshing the catalog" and very quickly consumed about 1 GB RAM:
















































During the download the RAM consumption grew to just about 4 GB RAM


sAfter download just about 1 GB RAM was released indicating that the RAM that the Package manager used has been released.

















































Judging from the fact that the application using most RAM in the process list was pkg, it can be assumed that the rest of the RAM is indeed consumed by ZFS and the Kernel.
So, the packagemanager in OI Hipster certainly is a little but RAM thirsty compared to dnf in Fedora 34.