[oi-dev] Plans to lower minimum memory requirements?

[Garrett D'Amore]

One of the things that occurs in the kernel is that a substantial amount
of code is far more complex than it needs to be, and a lot of drivers
allocate far larger buffering areas than they need to (or should!)
Google on bufferbloat for a description of some of these problems,
although the problems extend far beyond just networking.

	- Garrett

On Thu, 2011-03-17 at 21:19 +0100, Julian Wiesener wrote:
> Hi Olga,
> 
> On 03/17/11 08:51 PM, ольга крыжановская wrote:
> > btrfs claims to use less memory than zfs but is still a COW design and
> > openSUSE with btrfs runs smoothly in a vmware box with 384MB assigned.
> > How is this possible?
> 
> actually the ZFS, the Datacache, COW and the even more important (for
> small memory sizes) Metadatacache is not the biggest Problem here. The
> kernel it self without ZFS Caches consumes much more Memory than a
> typical Linux kernel, we would need to check if and where we can reduce
> the size (more at Illumos scope).
> 
> 
> (oi_148 i86pc)# echo '::memstat' | mdb -k
> Page Summary                Pages                MB  %Tot
> ------------     ----------------  ----------------  ----
> Kernel                     120290               469   23%
> Anon                       166739               651   32%
> Exec and libs                6381                24    1%
> Page cache                  26215               102    5%
> Free (cachelist)            66591               260   13%
> Free (freelist)            133495               521   26%
> 
> Total                      519711              2030
> Physical                   519710              2030
> 
> (oi_148 i86pc)# echo '::arc' | mdb -k
> ...
> p                         =        60 MB
> c                         =        64 MB
> c_min                     =        64 MB
> c_max                     =       481 MB
> size                      =        99 MB
> hdr_size                  =   1969824
> data_size                 =  64107520
> other_size                =  38426984
> ...
> arc_meta_used             =        99 MB
> arc_meta_limit            =       120 MB
> arc_meta_max              =       107 MB
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> > Is there any thing else we can do to optimize Openindiana?
> 
> Yes, the main problem is actually not ZFS or the kernel, what it really
> makes OI unusable to systems with smaller memory-size than 2GB is the
> fact. that IPS (pkg commands, as well as beadm) are consuming much
> memrory during upgrade/install. If you really want to make OI less
> memory consuming, IPS is the point to start.
> IPS is currently still developed open, people at oracle are working on
> reducing the memory footprint and we have currently no plans or need to
> fork IPS, so if you want to help in this area, i guess the best would it
> be to join the upstream project.
> 
> Personally i really would apprechiate an effort (i really hated it to
> buy an additional 1GB DIMM for my laptop just to be able to update) to
> reduce the memory footprint of OI.
> However, OI is actually not designed to be a small-hardware-desktop
> system. There are many operation systems (even a few osol based) which
> fits better into that scope and we currently have more urgends issues.
> We are aiming on moving to illumos and create a base for a stable server
> distribution and we'll have a lot to do to archive this first priority goal.
> 
> 
> Regards,
> Julian
> 
> 
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