Re: ZFS committed to the FreeBSD base.

    0n Thu, Apr 12, 2007 at 12:51:25AM +0200, Bernd Walter wrote: 

    >On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 05:49:11PM -0400, David Schultz wrote:
    >> On Sat, Apr 07, 2007, Dag-Erling Smrgrav wrote:
    >> > Bernd Walter <ticso_at_cicely12.cicely.de> writes:
    >> > > On Sat, Apr 07, 2007 at 09:43:59PM +0200, Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:
    >> > > > ZFS is now also available on pc98 and amd64.
    >> > > Great to read - is it just atomic.S missing for the remaining
    >> > > architectures?
    >> > 
    >> > Yes.  Ideally, ZFS would use FreeBSD's atomic operations instead of
    >> > its own.  I believe that the reason it doesn't is (at least in part)
    >> > that we don't have 64-bit atomic operations for i386.  I have
    >> > unfinished patches for cleaning up the atomic operations on all
    >> > platforms; I'll dust them off and see what I can do.
    >
    >I already did a good cleanup of arm atomic functions based on your
    >work a while ago.
    >
    >> As I recall, Solaris 10 targets PPro and later processors, whereas
    >> FreeBSD supports everything back to a 486DX.  Hence we can't
    >> assume that cmpxchg8b is available. The last time I remember this
    >> coming up, people argued that we had to do things slow way in the
    >> default kernel for compatibility.
    >
    >486 support is definitively needed, but it is very unlikely that many
    >real existing 486 system has enough RAM for ZFS.
    >AFAIK a ELAN520 can have up to 256MB, but I doubt that one would
    >spend so much RAM for such a system without better use for it.
    >Not shure about 586, this is more likely.
    >But I'm not very familar with x86 assembly, so I don't even know which
    >CPUs have cmpxchg8b.
    >If ZFS wouldn't be so greedy I might have used it on flash media for
    >x86 and ARM systems, but those boards usually don't have enough RAM.
    >
    >> Any ideas how ZFS and GEOM are going to work out, given that ZFS
    >> is designed to be the filesystem + volume manager in one?
    >
    >Although you want to use ZFS RAID functionality GEOM has still many
    >goodies avalable, such as md, ggate, partition-parsing, encyption, etc.
    >There are other cool points, which I've found possible lately.

partition-parsing ? got any info on that ? I have never heard of it.

 -aW

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