[geeks] OpenSolaris on the Intel D510 Atom

[Joshua Boyd]

After fighting my way through the Ubuntu issues, I wanted to try
OpenSolaris on the new Atom board on a seperate disk before the machine
got settled into normal use.

First impression, the LiveCD booted and worked correctly including
graphics in VESA mode and the networking.  The install was simple and
painless, and afterwards came right up with graphics in VESA mode and
the networking working on the onboard RealTek chip.

Bonnie++ on the 3-4 year old local disk said that for block operations
it would be able to do something like 50 MB/s reads and 35 MB/s writes.

My main area of testing was to create a new file system and share it via
NFS to an Ubuntu 9.10 workstation.  Initial results were 42MB/s reads
and 3-8 MB/s writes (measured by timing copies).  Not so good.  I
disabled ZIL (obviously I wouldn't do that for production, but I figured
it was fair to do it now and assume that a sensible flash drive would
give reasonably similar performance with ZIL on in the future) and tried
again, and things got better.  I tried running bonnie++ remotely over
NFS, and OpenSolaris lost it's networking.  No amount of ifconfig
up/down or un-plumbing and plumbing the interface would bring it back,
so I resorted to rebooting the system.   

At that point I did some research.  It looks like many people have
problems with the gre driver.   I found a gani driver, but I also saw
many people try that then end up adding a seperate network interface.  I
didn't bother with the gani drive.  I didn't think I would easily be
able to add a good ethernet card since most cheap PCI ones seem to be
Realtek and most good Intel or Broadcom GigE cards seem to be 64bit and
I didn't think that such a card would fit.  Still, I grabbed my unused
Broadcom PCI-X card, and found that they left enough room on either side
of the PCI slot to fit a 64bit card.  Nice.

With the broadcom card, it delivered NFS writes of 32 MB/s and reads of
45 MB/s.  I feel that this is reasonable evidence to suggest that the
SuperMicro D510 server board will do very nicely as a ZFS storage
server.  That SuperMicro board comes with dual Intel GigE ports, not
Realtek.  And it also offers 6x SATA ports.  I think I'm likely to order
one of those in the future.

For low demand home applications, the Intel D510MO board (the one I
bought) could very well work nicely with mirrored SATA disk drives, a
good Intel or Broadcom GigE NIC and a pro quality USB drive, such as
this: http://www.logicsupply.com/products/af4gssgh
While USB isn't all that fast, the linked drive claims to do writes of
25 MB/s, and that means that the ZFS server is limited to 25 MB/s, that
probably isn't too bad for storing videos and photos for a lot of home
users.  I'm trying to resist the urge to purchase that USB drive to find
out.