Packaging ZFS

[Alberto Bursi]

On 10/08/23 22:36, Thibaut wrote:
> 
> 
>> Le 10 août 2023 à 22:25, Philip Prindeville <philipp_subx at redfish-solutions.com> a écrit :
>>
>>
>>
>>> On Aug 10, 2023, at 11:49 AM, Torbjörn Jansson <torbjorn at jansson.tech> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 2023-08-06 21:39, Philip Prindeville wrote:
>>>> I don't know... I have a Xeon D-1548 based 1U Supermicro server with a 4TB NVMe stick that would make a decent file server/NAS...
>>>>> On Aug 6, 2023, at 11:46 AM, Paul D <newtwen at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Pretty sure not. I'm receptive to ZFS and have used it in a few projects. Openwrt tends to focus on (devices with) smaller flash drives. Other FS better suited to such env.
>>>>>
>>>>> No ZFS is in available software packages today, in any case.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On 2023-08-06 00:53, Philip Prindeville wrote:
>>>>>> Has anyone tried to package ZFS (more correctly, OpenZFS) for OpenWRT?  Is there any interest in doing so?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> https://github.com/openzfs/zfs
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>
>>> you could always run openwrt as a vm under a hypervisor, for example proxmox.
>>> then you can keep openwrt without any extra packages like zfs and create extra vms as needed, proxmox already supports zfs if im not mistaken.
>>>
>>> if your lucky with the iommu groups you might even be able to pass thru one or more physical network interfaces to the openwrt vm directly.
>>
>>
>>
>> I can't assume that the underlying hardware supports virtualization or does so in a meaningful way.  Some of the platforms I'm looking at are resource lean.  I threw out the Xeon-D as an example as my prototyping hardware, but I'm not going to assume that everyone has comparable hardware.
> 
> ZFS is anything *but* resource lean, though.

It's actually more lean than most think.

Lots of outdated information from the old Solaris/Illumos or BSD's 
version of ZFS is still preached as gospel in some influential circles 
(*cough*TrueNAS forums*cough*).
For example the most common rule of thumb aka "1GB for 1TB of storage" 
is outdated since OpenZFS on Linux 0.8 (released in 2019).

Also, while by default ZFS is occupying half the available ram as cache, 
that's just a default setting that can (and in most cases should) be 
changed depending on your needs.

For example this person ran a 2TB ZFS with the RAM cache limited to 64MB 
(the minimum possible) on a tiny RiscV board with 512MB RAM. And in his 
benchmark it still ran slightly better than ext4 for non-encrypted volumes.
https://andreas.welcomes-you.com/zfs-risc-v-512mb-lichee-rv/
(archived version on Internet Archive)
http://web.archive.org/web/20230604205911/https://andreas.welcomes-you.com/zfs-risc-v-512mb-lichee-rv/

I have also ran some resource-contrained NAS PCs where I had limited ZFS 
to use only 512MB of ram and it is still running fine for 8TB arrays.


-Alberto

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