[OpenIndiana-discuss] Install OpenIndiana in an UFS root

[Saso Kiselkov]

On 9/9/13 7:09 PM, Simon Toedt wrote:
> 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.

If you're planning to run on Illumos-derived OSes in the cloud,
seriously, go to a cloud provider who gives you zones. Much less
overhead with much higher performance at the same price point.

-- 
Saso