FreeBSD + ZFS on a production server?

[Wojciech Puchar]

> The choice is probably between "Debian 4.0r3", "FreeBSD 7.0" and
> "OpenSolaris 2008.05". All of them have their pros and cons.
>

could you tell any pros for opensolaris?

> I think Debian / Linux, almost falls off because it lacks support for
> native ZFS and I have not found any alternative filesystem that offer
> checksums on the fly.

agree
>
> My main question is: How is the support for ZFS on FreeBSD? Is it

while i don't use it, it works rather as in manual. no crashes if 
configured right.

> sufficiently stable and fast enough to be used in production yet?

that's just my opinion about ZFS that it isn't very useful at all. it's 
just memory and CPU eater.

> If not, is there any alternative filesystem that offers checksums on
> the fly or other similar technology to reduce the risk of a corrupt
> filesystem that at the same time plays well with software RAID (RAID-1
> in particular)?

while i use RAID-1 for a long time be it linux or netbsd or freebsd, there 
is no need for checksumming. there are sector's checksums on disks, 
checked on every read. in SATA protocol there is error checking during 
transmission too.

there is already well done things in hardware to do disk transfers without 
CPU overhead, but ZFS introduces overhead and advertises it as feature.

quick advice - gmirror this 2 drives and then use UFS.