svn commit: r356758 - in head/usr.sbin/bsdinstall: . scripts

[Ben Woods]

On Sat, 18 Jan 2020 at 09:16, Mike Karels <mike at karels.net> wrote:

> > On Fri, 17 Jan 2020 at 08:21, Ben Woods <woodsb02 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > Perhaps we could simply include a message on that bsdinstall
> partitioning
> > > mode selection screen that UFS is recommended on systems with < 4 Gb
> RAM?
> > >
>
> > I have uploaded a diff for this here: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D23224
>
> > Please let me know your thoughts (comments in the phabricator review
> would
> > be best).
>
> I think this needs more discussion, preferably on this list.  I am not
> convinced that systems with as little as 4 GB should use ZFS.  Conventional
> wisdom on the FreeNAS mailing list says that 8 GB is required for ZFS,
> and FreeNAS no longer includes UFS as an option.  Conrad suggested a
> cutoff of 16 GB; I am happier with 16 GB than 4 GB as a cutoff.  Also,
> there was mention of auto-tuning for smaller systems; I don't think that
> has materialized yet.  I'm not sure how plausible that is without knowing
> the workload.  I use ZFS on a workstation/server with 64 GB that runs 4
> bhyve guests that do things like buildworld.  ZFS wants 63 GB for arc_max;
> needless to say, I have a tunable set to a much lower value.  If tuning
> is required, it is unclear that ZFS is a good default.
>
>                 Mike
>


Hi everyone,

Before I commit phabricator review D23224, is there any final comments?

Particularly on these 2 lines of help-text:
msg_partitioning_zfs_help="ZFS is recommended if you have at least 4GB RAM"
msg_partitioning_ufs_help="UFS is recommended if you have less than 4GB of
RAM"

There is some disagree about what these 2 recommendations should be.

4GB was recommended by: imp, emaste, philip, eugen, dteske
8GB was recommended by: mike
16GB was recommended by: cem

The 4GB limit seems to have the best consensus, however there was some
debate about whether ZFS is recommended on a system with 4GB, or only
systems with MORE THAN 4GB.

As for the ZFS auto-tuning, I see that as being a separate discussion
(which could ultimately change this recommendation, but shouldn't prevent
us from committing this help text now).

Regards,
Ben

--
From: Benjamin Woods
woodsb02 at gmail.com