I don't think the author of this post really understands ZFS.
Is that a 4 disk mirror? You'd be much faster using a raid10 there.
ZFS 'cache' devices are't for write cache either, you'd want a log device for write perf reasons if that's your constraint... Even then it's unlikely to make a difference on a workstation workload with 16GB of memory..
I used SXCE, OpenSolaris and finally SmartOS for a while after the death, and unfortunately the benefits just werent' really there any more. I also hit some pretty nasty performance issues storage wise on my OVH gear (some interrupt related issue, unsure if fixed, but it was well above my head to grok, and I' not terribly new to this) which were instantly solved by converting to BSD.
With FreeBSD, the userland is pretty capable (I run all my DBs, some node apps, reverse proxies etc under it) so jails kinda made sense again. With SmartOS I had to run most of my stuff under KVM, so what was the point?
Interesting to see what direction the linux abi stuff joyent are working on goes though.
Disappointing really, but I think it's unlikely to make it upstream. Perhaps I've missed some of the advantages to taking this approach though.. Or .. any of them?
I'd be completely onboard with SMF replacing the init system on all my fbsd boxes though (I have many on bare metal with linux under bhyve for various things that need it).
I don't think that's an easy port though with the contract system etc solaris had for process accounting.
Ahhh. I miss solaris. FreeBSD is almost where we were feature wise before oracle killed it (zfs, dtrace, jails(iocage) etc).
Is it a GPL violation to create a separate .deb which includes only the binary kernel module for zfs which can be simply apt-get'd?
Or are canonical planning on including the zfs code in the base 'kernel-blabla' package?
If the latter, why not just have a sep package for the module? I imagine you'll need to install some 'zfs' package to get the userland tools anyway ?