Anyone tried Nevada with ZFS on small platforms? I ordered one of these: http://www.fit-pc.com/new/fit-pc-slim-specifications.html Planning to stick in a 160-gig Samsung drive and use it for lightweight household server. Probably some Samba usage, and a tiny bit of Apache & RADIUS. I don''t need it to be super-fast, but slow as watching paint dry won''t work either. Just curious if anyone else has tried something similar everything I read says ZFS wants 1-gig RAM but don''t say what size of penalty I would pay for having less. I could run Linux on it of course but now prefer to remain free of the tyranny of fsck. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 3:55 PM, Vincent Fox <vincent_b_fox at yahoo.com> wrote:> Anyone tried Nevada with ZFS on small platforms?Yes - on the least powerful system I would even think of trying ZFS on - an Intel D945GCLF2 (dual-core 1.6GHz Atom 330) with 2Gb of RAM and 2 SATA ports. It came up in 32-bit mode - now I know a later version of OpenSolaris will run in 64-bit mode on this platform (the motherboard with CPU costs about $85 - you just install an in-expensive 2Gb SIMM and you''re ready to roll. It was a little slower than I would like - felt like I was going backwards in time to the earlier P4 based systems.> I ordered one of these: > > http://www.fit-pc.com/new/fit-pc-slim-specifications.html > > Planning to stick in a 160-gig Samsung drive and use it for lightweight household server. Probably some Samba usage, and a tiny bit of Apache & RADIUS. I don''t need it to be super-fast, but slow as watching paint dry won''tYou know that you need a minimum of 2 disks to form a (mirrored) pool with ZFS? A pool with no redundancy is not a good idea!> work either. Just curious if anyone else has tried something similar everything I > read says ZFS wants 1-gig RAM but don''t say what size of penalty I would pay > for having less. I could run Linux on it of course but now prefer to remain free of > the tyranny of fsck.I don''t think that there is enough CPU "horse-power" on this platform to run OpenSolaris - and you need approx 768Kb (3/4 of a Gb) of RAM just to install it. After that OpenSolaris will only increase in size over time.... To try to run it as a ZFS server would be madness - worse than watching paint dry. There are some RAID controllers on the market with more horsepower than you''ve got in this system.... OTOH - this platform would make an excellent firewall if you load MonoWall on it! Regards, -- Al Hopper Logical Approach Inc,Plano,TX al at logical-approach.com Voice: 972.379.2133 Timezone: US CDT OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) Member - Apr 2005 to Mar 2007 http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/ogb/ogb_2005-2007/
> You know that you need a minimum of 2 disks to form a > (mirrored) pool > with ZFS? A pool with no redundancy is not a good > idea!According to the slides I have seen, a ZFS filesystem even on a single disk can handle massive amounts of sector failure before it becomes unusable. I seem to recall it said 1/8th of the disk? So even on a single disk the redundancy in the metadata is valuable. And if I don''t have really very much data I can set copies=2 so I have better protection for the data as well. My goal is a compact low-powered and low-maintenance widget. Eliminating the chance of fsck is always a good thing now that I have tasted ZFS. I''m going to try and see if Nevada will even install when it arrives, and report back. Perhaps BSD is another option. If not I will fall back to Ubuntu. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
On Wed, 5 Nov 2008, Vincent Fox wrote:> According to the slides I have seen, a ZFS filesystem even on a > single disk can handle massive amounts of sector failure before it > becomes unusable.When a tiny volcanic jet of molten plastic shoots out of the chip on the disk drive (followed by a bit of smoke and foul odor), the entire disk becomes unusable. Bob =====================================Bob Friesenhahn bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
>> Planning to stick in a 160-gig Samsung drive and use it for lightweight household server. Probably some Samba usage, and a tiny bit of Apache & RADIUS. I don''t need it to be super-fast, but slow as watching paint dry won''t > > You know that you need a minimum of 2 disks to form a (mirrored) pool > with ZFS? A pool with no redundancy is not a good idea!My pools with no redundancy is working very fine. Redundancy is better but you can certainly run without. You should do backups in all cases.> >> work either. Just curious if anyone else has tried something similar everything I > read says ZFS wants 1-gig RAM but don''t say what size of penalty I would pay >> for having less. I could run Linux on it of course but now prefer to remain free of > the tyranny of fsck. > > I don''t think that there is enough CPU "horse-power" on this platform > to run OpenSolaris - and you need approx 768Kb (3/4 of a Gb) of RAM > just to install it. After that OpenSolaris will only increase in size > over time.... To try to run it as a ZFS server would be madness - > worse than watching paint dry.I don''t know about the CPU but 1Gb RAM on a home server works fine. I even have a 256Mb debian in virtualbox on my server with 1Gb RAM. Just turn X11 off. (/usr/dt/bin/dtconfig -d) The installation have a higher RAM requirement than the installed system as you can''t have swap for the installation. Before ZFS solaris has improved its RAM usage for every release. Workstations are a different matter.
On 6 Nov 2008, at 04:09, Vincent Fox wrote:> According to the slides I have seen, a ZFS filesystem even on a > single disk can handle massive amounts of sector failure before it > becomes unusable. I seem to recall it said 1/8th of the disk? So > even on a single disk the redundancy in the metadata is valuable. > And if I don''t have really very much data I can set copies=2 so I > have better protection for the data as well. > > My goal is a compact low-powered and low-maintenance widget. > Eliminating the chance of fsck is always a good thing now that I > have tasted ZFS.In my personal experience, disks are more likely to fail completely than suffer from small sector failures. But don''t get me wrong, provided you have a good backup strategy and can afford the downtime of replacing the disk and restoring, then ZFS is still a great filesystem to use for a single disk. Dont be put off. Many of the people on this list are running multi- terabyte enterprise solutions and are unable to think in terms of non- redundant, small numbers of gigabytes :-)> I''m going to try and see if Nevada will even install when it > arrives, and report back. Perhaps BSD is another option. If not I > will fall back to Ubuntu.I have FreeBSD and ZFS working fine(*) on a 1.8GHz VIA C7 (32bit) processor. Admittedly this is with 2GB of RAM, but I set aside 1GB for ARC and the machine is still showing 750MB free at the moment, so I''m sure it could run with 256MB of ARC in under 512MB. 1.8GHz is a fair bit faster than the Geode in the Fit-PC, but the C7 scales back to 900MHz and my machine still runs acceptably at that speed (although I wouldn''t want to buildworld with it). I say, give it a go and see what happens. I''m sure I can still dimly recall a time when 500MHz/512MB was a kick-ass system... Jonathan (*) This machine can sustain 110MB/s off of the 4-disk RAIDZ1 set, which is substantially more than I can get over my 100Mb network.
Al Hopper wrote: Linux on it of course but now prefer to remain free of > the tyranny of fsck.> > I don''t think that there is enough CPU "horse-power" on this platform > to run OpenSolaris - and you need approx 768Kb (3/4 of a Gb) of RAM > just to install it. After that OpenSolaris will only increase in size > over time.... To try to run it as a ZFS server would be madness - > worse than watching paint dry.I run OpenSolaris as a webserver and ZFS based NFS NAS on an old 900Mhz AMD Athlon with 640Mb of RAM it for my needs it works just fine and I''ve never noticed any performance problems with the NFS serving for my needs - which is mostly just serving up photos and music to MacOS X over NFS. -- Darren J Moffat
Mattias Pantzare wrote:> I even have a 256Mb debian in virtualbox on my server with 1Gb RAM. > Just turn X11 off. (/usr/dt/bin/dtconfig -d)And how would that make VirtualBox run? Does it not need X? -- Dick Hoogendijk -- PGP/GnuPG key: F86289CE ++ http://nagual.nl/ | SunOS 10u6 10/08 ++
On 06 November, 2008 - dick hoogendijk sent me these 0,4K bytes:> > Mattias Pantzare wrote: > > > I even have a 256Mb debian in virtualbox on my server with 1Gb RAM. > > Just turn X11 off. (/usr/dt/bin/dtconfig -d) > > And how would that make VirtualBox run? > Does it not need X?There''s a headless version, and you can RDP to it from another machine.. /Tomas -- Tomas ?gren, stric at acc.umu.se, http://www.acc.umu.se/~stric/ |- Student at Computing Science, University of Ume? `- Sysadmin at {cs,acc}.umu.se
I loaded OpenSolaris nv101 on it and the result was very disappointing. Not merely a little pokey it was unacceptably slow and the casing got very warm. I am guessing it was pushing CPU right to 100% all the time. Took hours to load and when booting took minutes. Also didn''t see an easy way to disable graphical login so on boot every time it would go to scrambled graphics and then no easy way to get in to turn off graphics. Trying virtual console switching didn''t work for me. It didn''t take me long to realize this wasn''t going to be usable. I loaded Ubuntu 8.10 Server which worked great. OpenSolaris is just too demanding for small hardware. Oh well, the hardware will still be used for it''s intended purpose just not with the OS I would have preferred. You can stop reading here if you aren''t interested in the Slim: One oddity I didn''t see anything in BIOS for timed power control. Usually I''m using to being able to set up a timer so if it''s off it gets turned on at 4AM or something like that. Okay this part is COOL, in the BIOS you can underclock the CPU/RAM to lower levels. Went all the way down to 200 MHz. I didn''t do power measurements on that yet but I''m guessing if you really have it doing very lightweight jobs you could set for lower speed and save another Watt. Loaded with Ubuntu 8.10 Server. Wow! This is exactly what I''m looking for. Not going to encode video on it after all so the weakish CPU doesn''t matter. Boots quickly and runs fine. Casing just gets warm not hot. Planning to run Apache, RADIUS, Nagios, maybe Samba and a few other things for internal use. Putting drives in it is easy. Removing drives is a pain due to the short IDE cable and it''s tight connector, and I got really tired of it as I swapped in a couple of different drives testing OS. Sizewise it''s smaller than my WRT54GS router and uses a little less power. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
Hi> Not merely a little pokey it was unacceptably slow and the casing got very warm. I am guessing it was pushing CPU right to 100% all the time. Took hours to load and when booting took minutes. Also didn''t see an easy way to disable graphical login so on boot every time it would go to scrambled graphics and then no easy way to get in to turn off graphics. Trying virtual console switching didn''t work for me. It didn''t take me long to realize this wasn''t going to be usable.Well... it''s easy to disable graphical login: svcadm disable cde-login I''d also recommend to disable some other unnecessary processes, ex: svcs | egrep ''webco|wbem|avahi|print|font|cde|sendm|name-service-cache|opengl'' | awk ''{print $3}'' | xargs -n1 svcadm disable This should made your system more usable on light hardware. Regards Mike
Fit-PC Slim uses Geode LX800 which is 500 MHz CPU with 512 megs RAM.> Well... it''s easy to disable graphical login: > > svcadm disable cde-loginThe problem is there''s no option during install to say "no graphics" so during firstboot it''s going to try anyhow. At which point my console is hosed and I can''t login to execute svcadm.> I''d also recommend to disable some other unnecessary > processes, ex: > > svcs | egrep > ''webco|wbem|avahi|print|font|cde|sendm|name-service-ca > che|opengl'' | awk > ''{print $3}'' | xargs -n1 svcadm disable > > This should made your system more usable on light > hardware.The rather lengthy install time, long boot, and very warm casing tell me I was asking too much of the hardware. Maybe if I''d switched to UFS I would lighten load but ZFS boot is a major reason for attempting Nevada in the first place. I''m a Solaris admin at a datacenter, we use 10u6 now in a few production systems and it works OK on even a NetraT1 with 2 gigs RAM for a few admin services. I could have booted single/failsafe and sorted things out but why? It became obvious to me at some point this wasn''t worth fighting. An Atom like the Asus EEE Box would be a better minimum choice. I like my hardware a bit more lean & mean & fanless though for small jobs. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
Solaris 10 U6 and Solaris Express Community Edition can both be installed in text mode. Nexenta and Belenix will also run on this machine with 512MB. Nexenta will probably be what you want if you are saying you are running ubuntu on this box. -----Original Message----->>Fit-PC Slim uses Geode LX800 which is 500 MHz CPU with 512 megs RAM. >>Well... it''s easy to disable graphical login: > > svcadm disable cde-loginThe problem is there''s no option during install to say "no graphics" so during firstboot it''s going to try anyhow. At which point my console is hosed and I can''t login to execute svcadm. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20081110/09e13022/attachment.html>
> <P><FONT SIZE=2>Solaris 10 U6 and Solaris Express > Community Edition can both be installed in text mode. > Nexenta and Belenix will also run on this machine > with 512MB. Nexenta will probably be what you want if > you are saying you are running ubuntu on this > box.<BR>Perhaps I wasn''t sufficiently clear. I *installed* in text mode of course. However on booting the system it wants to start graphics. Why do people keep beating on this point? Yes I could have done various workarounds to disable graphics. My point was during the INSTALL there is no way to specify you just want a plain text console for the later running system. You are expected to boot, then login and disable it later. Is that clear now? -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
That''s why I said Nexenta. It''s text mode after the fact, from the get go, after the install and reboot. http://www.nexenta.org/os -----Original Message----->> Nexenta and Belenix will also run on this machine >> with 512MB. Nexenta will probably be what you want if >> you are saying you are running ubuntu on this >> box.<BR>>Perhaps I wasn''t sufficiently clear.>I *installed* in text mode of course.>However on booting the system it wants to start graphics.-------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20081111/3b227faf/attachment.html>