FreeBSD & Software RAID

[Kirk Strauser]

On Tuesday 26 May 2009 01:44:51 pm Gary Gatten wrote:
> What about with PAE and/or other extension schemes?
>
> If it's just memory requirements, can I assume if I don't have a $hit
> load of storage and billions of files it will work "ok" with 4GB of RAM?
> I guess I'm just making sure there isn't some bug that only exists on
> the i386 architecture?

My understanding is that it's much more than "just" the memory addressing.  
ZFS is thoroughly 64-bit and uses 64-bit math pervasively.  That means you 
have to emulate all those operations with 2 32-bit values, and on the 
register-starved x86 platform you end up with absolutely horrible performance.  
Furthermore, it's just not that well tested.  Sun designed ZFS for 64-bit 
systems and I think 32-bit support was pretty much an afterthought.
-- 
Kirk Strauser