Calling all file system programmers! ZFS Anyone?

[nyteschayde]

After reading over the various benefits of ZFS, an open-source file system on the OpenSolaris web site I think the Amiga could really benefit from this. In addition, Apple is also looking to include this in the next release of OS X. If Windows supported it we'd be in the back trying to catch up for new devices.

Go here to read more about it:
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/whatis/

[mr_a500]

I've read somewhere that ZFS has huge memory requirements and I just read this today:

been using now zfs since 06/06 u2 release has been out.
one thing have notised.
zfs eats a lot of memory.
right after boot mem usage is about 280M
but after accessing zfs disks usage rises fast to be 900M.
and it seems to stay in level of 90% of tot mem.
also noted it frees used mem but running "heavy" apps you see performace impact while zfs frees memory to other use.

This would make it basically useless for any classic Amiga.

[reflect]

erm, most kernels of today are designed after "if you have free memory, that is bad." - thus they try to use up as much ram as possible.. with caches, buffers etc. These algorithms are smart, and takes up what they need, and then eats up everything the operating system allows them to.

So if you only have 128mb ram, it won't kill your machine. Look at this, for instance;

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          2012       1995         16          0         31       1270
-/+ buffers/cache:        693       1319
Swap:         5938          0       5937

Out of 2GB of ram, it eats up 1995.. oh my god, this would kill any Amiga! ... no, it wouldn't. It's just using my ram, which is what it's there for. Not using it would sort of be a waste of money.

(right, that table looked so much better in the edit-window..)

[mr_a500]

erm, most kernels of today are designed after "if you have free memory, that is bad." - thus they try to use up as much ram as possible.. with caches, buffers etc. These algorithms are smart, and takes up what they need, and then eats up everything the operating system allows them to.

Yes, that's most kernels of today, not Amiga. I'd like to see what happens if you have a filesystem that uses all available RAM on an Amiga. You think it's like a modern OS and you can constantly use all available RAM and not have problems? Amiga does not have modern memory managment and you'd probably end up with "fragmentation city" (and will a filesystem designed for modern computers run on 8Mb of RAM?). Also, to use "smart algorithms" would require lots of CPU usage which is no problem on a modern computer but will probably drastically slow down an Amiga.

[Karlos]

I dunno whatever happened to it, but Future Drive Accelerator implemented a 'free memory' as cache system and it worked just fine.