Dear NetBSD users list,
I understand that on a server, often it's worth sinking a lot of memory
into ZFS for better performance.
But is it only me, or is this trade-off not the same for desktops?
50% of memory less may have severe consequences on a desktop:
- Many modern games that would maybe have worked via wine or a VM, will
no longer work since e.g. many will work with 16GB but not with 8GB.
- Some audio software similarly may require a lot of memory to run.
- Compiling many rust projects or some C++ projects will require more
than 8GB RAM, it would work on a 16GB RAM machine but not with ZFS.
I was surprised to see that this memory usage is configurable for many
ZFS implementations, but apparently not for NetBSD's:
https://wiki.netbsd.org/zfs/#index5h1
Are there any plans to change this and make it configurable? Perhaps
without recompiling the kernel, too?
I've already told one person to better not use ZFS on a desktop. I would
love to actually be able to recommend it.
(I also heard people worry ZFS means LLM code. I wonder, does NetBSD's
ZFS upstream include LLM code? What's the outlook of that once new code
is pulled in? Or is NetBSD's ZFS just its own independent fork now?)
Regards,
Ellie
