Sun Fire X4500, FreeBSD and ZFS

[Kenneth Vestergaard Schmidt]

Mjello.

Just thought I'd say that we've got a Sun Fire X4500 running with
-CURRENT as of yesterday and ZFS. Works beautifully, after we disabled
MSI and increased VM_KMEM_SIZE_MAX.

Without the increased VM_KMEM_SIZE_MAX, we got the usual panic (kmem_map
too small). I haven't tried adjusting maxvnodes - that might also have
helped. However, the machine has 16 GB RAM, so it might as well be used
for something. I'm not quite sure how to tweak the box efficiently, but
for now the bottleneck is our network, so we're going to upgrade some
pieces and try again.

We configured the 48 drives as follows:

- ad52 and ad60 are magic - the BIOS is hardcoded to boot from them, so
  we put them in a gmirror
- 5 RAIDZ2's, each with 9 disks, for a usable total of 7 per array
- one global hotspare

# zpool list
NAME                    SIZE    USED   AVAIL    CAP  HEALTH     ALTROOT
void                   20.3T   62.1G   20.3T     0%  ONLINE     -

# zfs list
NAME          USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
void         48.2G  15.5T  41.9K  /void

All in all, a fun little toy :)

-- 
Best Regards
Kenneth Schmidt