Re: When will ZFS become stable?

Robert Watson wrote:
> On Sun, 6 Jan 2008, Ivan Voras wrote:

>> Last I heard, rsync didn't crash Solaris on ZFS :)
> 
> My admittedly second-hand understanding is that ZFS shows similarly 
> gratuitous memory use on both Mac OS X and Solaris.  One advantage 
> Solaris has is that it runs primarily on expensive 64-bit servers with 
> lots of memory.  Part of the problem on FreeBSD is that people run ZFS 
> on sytems with 32-bit CPUs and a lot less memory.  It could be that ZFS 
> should be enforcing higher minimum hardware requirements to mount (i.e., 
> refusing to run on systems with 32-bit address spaces or <4gb of memory 
> and inadequate tuning).

Solaris nowadays refuses to install on anything without at least 1 GB of 
memory. I'm all for ZFS refusing to run on inadequatly tuned hardware, 
but apparently there's no algorithmic way to say what *is* adequately 
tuned, except for "try X and if it crashes, try Y, repeat as necessary".

The reason why I'm arguing this topic is that it isn't a matter of 
tuning like "it will run slowly if you don't tune it" - it's more like 
"it won't run at all if you don't go through the laborious 
trial-and-error process of tuning it, including patching your kernel and 
running a non-GENERIC configuration".