[OpenIndiana-discuss] Install OpenIndiana in an UFS root

[Richard Elling]

On Sep 9, 2013, at 11:09 AM, Simon Toedt <simon.toedt at gmail.com> 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.

Sounds like FUD from a Joyent competitor. Memory is used for cache in both
cases, so ext4 obviously does a worse job caching than ZFS.
 -- richard

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Richard.Elling at RichardElling.com
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