I need to replace my old NAS and I have some hardware to use, but plan A
failed dismally because Illumos does not have a working driver for the
Marvell 88e8057 GegE chip on my Saphire mobo - an AMD E350 device which
I have in a small case (otherwise I'd just add another NIC).
So:
1) does dragonfly support this chip?
Also - while I'm attracted to swap cache (and I have an SSD that I would
have used as boot, L2ARC and ZIL) I'm a little concerned that the
situation with flushing caches on hard disks isn't as clear as it is
with ZFS, which I trust to use write back cackes and flush explicitly.
So:
2) Does Dragonfly have proper support for flushing write back caches on
SATA drives?
I have read the notes on 'fsync flush modes' in hammer(8), but this does
not discuss whether fsync writes to the drive assuming write-through, or
forces a drive cache flush.
I'm also interested in whether such flushes will work if I configure the
4-off 2TB drives as a software RAID5 array.
Thanks
James
