[OpenIndiana-discuss] ARM port

[Jerry Kemp]

this is a copy-n-paste from the ZFS mailing list from a couple of years
ago.  Message time stamp is 18 June 2009.

Jerry
........................................................................


Erik Trimble wrote:
> Fajar A. Nugraha wrote:
>> Are they feasible targets for zfs?
>>
>> The N610N that I have (BCM3302, 300MHz, 64MB) isn't even powerful
>> enough to saturate either the gigabit wired or 802.11n wireless. It
>> only goes about 25Mbps.
>>
>> Last time I test on EEPC 2G's Celeron, zfs is slow to the point of
>> unusable. Will it be usable enough on most ARMs?
>>
>>
> Well, given that ARM processors use a completely different ISA (ie.
they're not x86-compatible), OpenSolaris won't run on them currently.
>
> If you'd like to do the port....
>
> <wink>
>
> I can't say as to the entire Atom line of stuff, but I've found the
Atoms are OK for desktop use, and not anywhere powerful enough for even
a basic NAS server.  The demands of wire-speed Gigabit, ZFS, and
encryption/compression are hard on the little Atom guys. Plus, it seems
to be hard to find an Atom motherboard which supports more than 2GB of
RAM, which is a serious problem.
>

Open mouth, insert foot.

The ARM port is now functional (and available). I would assume (though I
can't verify) that ZFS support is part of the port.

There are a wide variety of ARM chips, in all sorts of stuff. Given the
performance characteristics of some of the stuff I've been playing with
over the last decade (and a pre-look at an ARM-based netbook), I'd have
to say that any currently-available single-chip ARM-based system isn't
going to be good to run OpenSolaris/ZFS on.

That said, I can certainly see some really, really good uses for
ARM-based microcontrollers as the guts of an HBA.   They're likely good
enough to do something like a tiny computer-on-a-board setup.  Think
something like a Sun 7110-style system shrunk down to a PCI-E controller
- you have a simple host-based control program, hook a disk (or storage
system) to the ARM HBA, and you could have a nice little embedded ZFS
system.

Either that, or if someone would figure out a way to have multiple-chip
ARM implementations (where they could spread out the load efficiently).

-- 
Erik Trimble
Java System Support