[rescue] RPi vs SS20 benchmarks (interesting)

[Peter Corlett]

On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 08:05:59PM -0600, Mark Linimon wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 05:11:14PM +0000, Peter Corlett wrote:
>> FreeBSD 10. It finally has a packaging system and ZFS is properly supported.
> As a matter of fact, FreeBSD got ZFS before Linux did :-) Thus, we've had
> more time to work out the kinks.

The details are starting to become fuzzy with time, but I recall that ZFS boot
was rather funky before FreeBSD 10, and that it was lagging further behind in
features than ZoL did. FreeBSD 10.2 and ZoL 0.6.5 now have feature parity,
probably because the maintainers are all working together on OpenZFS rather
than taking periodic raids of the Illumos sources.

What finally pushed me over the edge was that FreeBSD actually bothered to test
the features whereas ZoL apparently just went "it compiles, ship it!". For
example, ZOL induces bizarre libsata errors (which cause a kernel panic if
there are loads of them) with recordsizes larger than 512k.

>> I can't speak for anything X related as I use it for servers.
> X/KDE/Gnome packages are available, but support for the latest graphics cards
> lags. For instance, if you have a laptop that is less than 2 years old, you
> probably won't be able to use the fanciest graphics modes.

I'm surprised that the support differs much from Linux, given it's going to be
X.Org under the hood on both Linux and BSD. X doesn't run in kernel space.

>> No memory-related crashes at all, which rather surprised me given the
>> combination of ZFS and 4GB of RAM.
> Early on, ZFS was more greedy with memory than it is now. Still, if you have
> large volumes and/or lots of snapshots, 4GB is not going to be enough.

It's what the Microservers shipped with, and I'm disinclined to spend money on
upgrading stopgap hardware. Or indeed avoid buying any more hardware, given I
expect to be slinging all my stuff in a van and leaving the country in a few
months. Admittedly, this plan failed slightly when I recently had the
opportunity to acquire an original Amiga 1000.