[OpenIndiana-discuss] Install OpenIndiana in an UFS root

[Simon Toedt]

On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 7:52 PM, Peter Tribble <peter.tribble at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> topic says it all. I want to install OpenIndiana on a UFS filesystem. No
>> typo. I do not want to use ZFS on my boot disk. Can you choose what
>> filesystem you want to use for your root during installation?
>>
>
> Not on OpenIndiana, the whole of packaging etc essentially
> requires ZFS root - so the same limitation will likely apply to
> any distro using IPS.
>
> You can install Tribblix to ufs; I'm not aware of any other
> distro that offers it as an option. (You might have some joy
> with OpenSXCE, although that uses the same Caiman
> installer as OI so intercepting it might be tricky.)
>
> Seriously, though, I would love to know *why* you don't want
> to install to ZFS. I can think of several reasons myself (which is
> why I added the option to Tribblix) but this is quite a specialist
> area, so what's your use case?

Running with less memory maybe? ZFS has a well-deserved reputation for
being memory hungry, something which keeps Solaris and Illumos out of
the cloud business - as the Amazon sales people say you can have six
Linux VMs with ext4fs for one Solaris VM with ZFS in the same memory
footprint.

Simon