[geeks] One, two, three, panic!

[Phil Stracchino]

Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Mar 2009, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> 
>> So the doc that says keep vm.kmem_size_max UNDER 400M is wrong?
> 
> For ZFS?  Absolutely.
> 
>> I hadn't come across the "known problems" doc Michael Turner referenced.
>> Frankly, reading that really makes it sound as though even on amd64,
>> ZFS on FreeBSD really isn't ready to be actually used yet.
> 
> Well, there is the message that pops up in dmesg when you load the ZFS
> module:
> 
>    WARNING: ZFS is considered to be an experimental feature in FreeBSD.

Well, yeah.  :)

> It can be made to work reliably; it just can't be trusted to regulate
> itself yet.  ZFS wasn't stable right away in Solaris, either.  Roughly two
> years passed between ZFS's inclusion in Sun's "ten steps ahead"
> advertisement and the first release of Solaris 10 that had some basic
> version of ZFS included.
> 
>> Going by that document, there is no such thing as a really stable
>> FreeBSD+ZFS configuration, particularly on i386.
> 
> Correct.  You can make it stable by constraining its memory usage, but it
> really wants a 64-bit ABI on which to run.  ZFS was designed with 64-bit
> processors in mind; it heavily uses 64-bit arithmetic and doesn't blink at
> asking for half a gig of memory at a go.


Yeah, frankly I suspected I was going to have trouble from the start
when 7.1R-amd64 wouldn't boot.  Even though it SHOULD boot on that hardware.

Well, as it happens, A Little Bird Told Me(tm) to expect to find a
couple of LSI 3080X cards coming my way.  So shortly, I should be able
to have another go at Solaris 10 on the box.

Should probably go download and burn the latest Solaris 10 x86 CDs...

> It's really unfortunate that it's still in the handbook.  Unmaintained
> documentation can be worse than none at all.

Seconded.

-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.