hardware for home use large storage

[Artem Belevich]

> How much ram are you running with?

8GB on amd64. kmem_size=16G, zfs.arc_max=6G

> In a latest test with 8.0-R on i386 with 2GB of ram, an install to a ZFS
> root *will* panic the kernel with kmem_size too small with default
> settings. Even dropping down to Cy Schubert's uber-small config will panic
> the kernel (vm.kmem_size_max = 330M, vfs.zfs.arc_size = 40M,
> vfs.zfs.vdev.cache_size = 5M); the system is currently stable using DIST
> kernel, vm.kmem_size/max = 512M, arc_size = 40M and vdev.cache_size = 5M.

On i386 you don't really have much wiggle room. Your address space is
32-bit and, to make things more interesting, it's split between
user-land and kernel. You can keep bumping KVA_PAGES only so far and
that's what limits your vm.kmem_size_max which is the upper limit for
vm.kmem_size.

The bottom line -- if you're planning to use ZFS, do switch to amd64.
Even with only 2GB of physical RAM available, your box will behave
better. At the very least it will be possible to avoid the panics
caused by kmem exhaustion.

--Artem