XEN i386 with PAE and zfs, trouble?

[Simon Dick]

On 4 March 2011 14:11, Dr Josef Karthauser <joe at tao.org.uk> wrote:
> Hey there,
>
> I've been asking these questions to the wrong list! Just found the xen list, so I'll recap here.
>
> I want to run amd64 on xen, at a VPS hosting provider. Due to cost constraints the sweet spot in the cost/memory ratio has given me a provider who will only support a "ops_pv" kernel. This means that XENHVM on amd64 is not available to me.
>
> The VPS provider will be giving me at least 6 gb of ram, and I want to run ZFS on the instance. This leaves me considering running the i386 kernel and relying on PAE to get access to the extra memory. I presume that I'll lose about 1.5-2gb of RAM to ZFS tuning, and hope that means that I'll have 4gb(-ish) available to userland processes.
>
> Is this a sensible assumption? Can I rely on this being a stable configuration, or am I high?! :)

Not sure if it's just me, but you lose a fair few of ZFSs features if
you're not running it on actual hardware drives, etc, though I think
what you're planning may work it's not a setup I'd like to run myself
apart from to experiment with :)