[oi-dev] OI project reboot required

[Garrett D'Amore]

On May 12, 2013, at 11:31 AM, Jim Klimov <jimklimov at cos.ru> wrote:

> On 2013-05-12 19:06, Garrett D'Amore wrote:
>> So, out of curiosity -- *who* is actively running illumos on 32-bit kit today?  I'm not interested in hypothetical uses or kit that is sitting around in your garage waiting for you to do something with it…. I'm interested in people who would be immediately impacted and severely so if illumos were not available on 32-bit CPUs right now.  (To give a counter example: I have a 32-bit Atom netbook, that I have OpenIndiana on.   I turn it on once every year or so… if that often … so I can't seriously claim that I would be negatively impacted if illumos were to move to 64-bit only.)
> 
> Indeed, I can't vouch for such systems, even my old home-NAS which was
> my first victim of illumos/OI endearment had a Pentium-D with x86_64
> support (though likely not virtualization acceleration features -
> which would IIRC require VMs to be 32-bit). This box would be in my
> production today, had it not broken while I am on a prolonged trip
> away from that home; but it won't be impacted by a 64-bit only OS,
> indeed (it did have some VMs for a test farm though, and they might
> be impacted).

Your VMs should be migratable to a more modern hypervisor, if the one you have can't run x64.

> 
> Also I know of many small (SOHO) storage boxes which can be made to
> work with OpenSolaris and illumos-based OSes, and of those only the
> HP N36 and N40L have (known to me) 64-bit AMD CPUs and ECC support;
> most other such boxes are built around Atom, and often 32-bit with
> some 2GB RAM. While this is not "interesting" for intensive production
> use, some users of these boxes as reliable (ZFS) home storage might
> be hurt by move to 64-bit only OS. Arguably though, lack of ECC did
> probably burn my home-NAS causing some corruptions poorly-explicable
> otherwise. While I wouldn't recommend non-ECC ZFS NASes for any use,
> at least as a newly built rig, people that have a black box which
> just works, and aren't keen on spending time and money to buy and
> setup regular upgrades, are kind of stuck with it until the HW dies.

The thing is… most of these "in place systems" aren't likely to want or need the continuous stream of updates.  We can argue about bug fixes, and security considerations, but your average home NAS isn't sitting out there exposed on the internet.  

Anyone building a new box like this would use a newer Atom that supports x64.  (And Atom is entirely unsuited to this due to lack of ECC, as you mentioned, but hey, most SOHO users don't care about that, although they should.  The ones who use ZFS because they worry about silent data corruption are probably *also* smart enough to understand the risks of running without ECC.)

I think *most* users of these SOHO boxes are *not* using illumos, even those who use illumos in other capacities, but are instead relying on FreeNAS, or the commercially supplied solution.

	- Garrett