Obviously things have been going on behind the scenes for much longer than the previous post web page has hinted, but according to Eric Trimble @ Sun, the port to ARM is complete.
This is a repost (below) of a message that was on the ZFS list earlier today. So it appears now that Solaris and/or OpenSolaris is available for Sparc, x86/x64, ARM and the IBM mainframe port that was announced around a year ago. Jerry ============================================= Erik Trimble wrote: > Fajar A. Nugraha wrote: >> Are they feasible targets for zfs? >> >> The N610N that I have (BCM3302, 300MHz, 64MB) isn't even powerful >> enough to saturate either the gigabit wired or 802.11n wireless. It >> only goes about 25Mbps. >> >> Last time I test on EEPC 2G's Celeron, zfs is slow to the point of >> unusable. Will it be usable enough on most ARMs? >> >> > Well, given that ARM processors use a completely different ISA (ie. they're not x86-compatible), OpenSolaris won't run on them currently. > > If you'd like to do the port.... > > <wink> > > I can't say as to the entire Atom line of stuff, but I've found the Atoms are OK for desktop use, and not anywhere powerful enough for even a basic NAS server. The demands of wire-speed Gigabit, ZFS, and encryption/compression are hard on the little Atom guys. Plus, it seems to be hard to find an Atom motherboard which supports more than 2GB of RAM, which is a serious problem. > Open mouth, insert foot. The ARM port is now functional (and available). I would assume (though I can't verify) that ZFS support is part of the port. There are a wide variety of ARM chips, in all sorts of stuff. Given the performance characteristics of some of the stuff I've been playing with over the last decade (and a pre-look at an ARM-based netbook), I'd have to say that any currently-available single-chip ARM-based system isn't going to be good to run OpenSolaris/ZFS on. That said, I can certainly see some really, really good uses for ARM-based microcontrollers as the guts of an HBA. They're likely good enough to do something like a tiny computer-on-a-board setup. Think something like a Sun 7110-style system shrunk down to a PCI-E controller - you have a simple host-based control program, hook a disk (or storage system) to the ARM HBA, and you could have a nice little embedded ZFS system. Either that, or if someone would figure out a way to have multiple-chip ARM implementations (where they could spread out the load efficiently). -- Erik Trimble Java System Support Mailstop: usca22-123 Phone: x17195 Santa Clara, CA
