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

[skeevy420]

Unbuffered-ECC DDR4 SODIMM's weren't too bad. Bit over hundred euros for 16Gb sticks (German Amazon). Regular-sized sticks cost more but availability was much bigger issue than cost. There simply didn't seem to be any to be had. Unless you opted for vendor-branded workstation sticks with their attached massive air in prices. I searched long before I found couple of "generic" 2666MHz unbuffered-ECC sticks from Crucial, costing 140eur/pc and settled on those.

I was finding equivalent prices here in the states at the time when I came across a special for 32GB of 3600 for $134 that I couldn't pass up; especially because I was buying an APU.

[aht0]

3200 unbuffered ECC was stupid expensive in February when I built my current system and took me way over-budget so I opted for faster memory to make my APU happy.

Unbuffered-ECC DDR4 SODIMM's weren't too bad. Bit over hundred euros for 16Gb sticks (German Amazon). Regular-sized sticks cost more but availability was much bigger issue than cost. There simply didn't seem to be any to be had. Unless you opted for vendor-branded workstation sticks with their attached massive air in prices. I searched long before I found couple of "generic" 2666MHz unbuffered-ECC sticks from Crucial, costing 140eur/pc and settled on those.

[skeevy420]

When you turn non-essential features off, you can get by using sub-1Gb RAM. On FreeBSD at least. 512Mb RAM chugged along on ZFS - just take some time first with tuning flags.
Another question is, these days, why'd you even have machine with 4GB RAM or less - RAM's cheap enough..? I've got two rigs myself, both have 32GB installed. One of the two's even using ECC unbuffered DDR4 sticks.

I don't even know why a person would consider ZFS on 4GB or less system. There are better tools for the job. But I agree that if a person limits it up and sets the right feature flags they should be just fine on a low memory system.

4Gb or less machines -- About all I can think of are people repurposing shitty spec'd Chromebooks, Atoms, HPs, Dells, etc that come with crap amounts of ram and aren't upgradable or are in a place where ram upgrades are less than likely to occur (places like N. Korea). I'm currently running a 4TB mirror with 32Gb of non-ECC 3600 DDR4 sticks. 3200 unbuffered ECC was stupid expensive in February when I built my current system and took me way over-budget so I opted for faster memory to make my APU happy.

[aht0]

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.

When you turn non-essential features off, you can get by using sub-1Gb RAM. On FreeBSD at least. 512Mb RAM chugged along on ZFS - just take some time first with tuning flags.
Another question is, these days, why'd you even have machine with 4GB RAM or less - RAM's cheap enough..? I've got two rigs myself, both have 32GB installed. One of the two's even using ECC unbuffered DDR4 sticks.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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)

[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.

[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.