Install of 13.0-RELEASE i386 with ZFS root hangs up

[Konstantin Belousov]

On Fri, May 07, 2021 at 09:48:07AM -0700, Freddie Cash wrote:
> On Fri, May 7, 2021 at 5:49 AM Yasuhiro Kimura <yasu at utahime.org> wrote:
> 
> > Does anyone succeed to install 13.0-RELEASE i386 with ZFS root?
> >
> > I tried this with VirtualBox and VMware Player on Windows with
> > following VM condition.
> >
> > * 4 CPUs
> > * 8GB memory
> > * 100GB disk
> > * Bridge mode NIC
> >
> > But in both cases, VM gets high CPU load and hangs up after I moved
> > to 'YES' at 'ZFS Configuration' menu and type return key.
> >
> > If I select UFS root installation completes successfully. So the
> > problem is specific to ZFS root.
> >
> 
> Running ZFS on 32-bit OSes is doable (although not recommended) but
> requires a lot of manual configuration and tweaking, especially around
> kernel memory and ARC usage.
> 
> You're limited to 4 GB of memory space, so you need to tune the ARC to use
> less than that.  The auto-tuning has improved a lot over the years, but you
> still need to limit the ARC size to around 2 GB (or less) to keep the
> system stable.  KVA memory space tuning shouldn't be needed anymore, but
> you can do research into that, just in case.
> 
> You can compile a custom kernel to enable PAE support, that will sometimes
> help with memory issues on i386 (and will allow you to use more than 4 GB
> of system RAM, although individual processes are still limited to 4 GB).
i386 kernel uses memory up to 24G since 13.0.

PAE only means that devices that can access full 64bit address are allowed
to avoid dma bouncing.


> 
> If you really need to, you can make ZFS work on i386.  If at all possible,
> though, you really should run it on amd64 instead.
> 
> -- 
> Freddie Cash
> fjwcash at gmail.com
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-stable at freebsd.org mailing list
> https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-stable-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"