[OpenIndiana-discuss] Does OI compress the zpool by default?

[Jim Klimov]

On February 28, 2021 3:38:34 PM UTC, cretin1997 via openindiana-discuss <openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org> wrote:
>zfs get compression and zfs get compressratio results seemed to tell
>that it's not on by default. But, why?
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On older systems, (grub-based) loaders might not handle the compressed rpool, rpool/ROOT and rpool/ROOT/YourBEname.

On newer ones, this is no longer a problem. (But I am not sure if new loader is ok with all possible compression algos).

Another issue is that compression trades off CPU for I/O, differently for many algos out there, and as many other things in enterprise software (which illumos came from) it is an admin's choice what they would prefer, explicitly and predictably. Say, you have a VM on already compressed host system that does it cheaper - then why bother in VM for no real gain?

I did not install from scratch for a while, so not sure if install wizards ask if you want to compress your first rpool. At worst, you can do it post-factum by setting the compression attr and doing a zfs send|recv into a new BE name.

Jim

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