B
badbrain
Guest
I tested all of them on VirtualBox, as I didn't want to accidentally destroy my data. I tried the most active developed distros aside from SmartOS, OpenIndiana and OmniOSCE. I'm somewhat disappointed about their performance. They're too slow. OpenIndiana boot up very slow. People suggested there's something to do with kpti, I didn't test with kpti disabled, though. The slowest of all of them is the installation process. It took more than 20 mins on VirtualBox to complete OpenIndiana installation on VirtualBox, I could make it feel a bit faster if I enabled Use host IO cache on VirtualBox, overally, it's still very slow. I didn't want to wrongly blame something so I find a HDD and test OpenIndiana installation on real hardware on it. It's even slower than on VirtualBox, after 30 mins stuck at 99% I decided to cancel the installation. My controller is SATA. The controller of VirtualBox also SATA, I observed it's a bit faster if I use IDE controller. Both IDE and SATA controller can't be unconfigure by cfgadm, only with SCSI controller. OmniOSCE installation also slow when you consider the size of the installed system. I found no way to force 4k sector (ashift 12), the sd.conf hack doesn't work, set minium ashift to 4096 also doesn't work. The OmniOSCE option to force 4k sector also doesn't work, I guessed it use the same hack to set minium ashift. Either way, after tested many time, I stuck with ashift 9.
I think if someone want to use ZFS now, FreeBSD or Linux is the way to go. It's very sad to see the OS where ZFS was invented no longer fit as a ZFS host system anymore. I found the state of Illumos now is frozen in time, they only try to build it with new GCC to keep it alive but don't have the ability to move it ahead.
Disclaimer: I've no relationship with Solaris, though. I've never used it in the past and will not consider using it in the future, given it state now. The system is not difficult to use, though. I could update, search and install packages with pkg after reading OpenIndiana's Wiki and install Joyent's pkgsrc binary packages with pkgin. I don't know how to do other administrative jobs, though. The documentation is severely lacked comparing to FreeBSD, sometime I've to fall back to Oracle's Solaris 10 documents, Oracle's also harder to read and understand for a noob like me, FreeBSD handbook is much easier. Don't get me wrong, I found Linux to be the most user friendly. I would definitely prefer free -m over vmstat.
I think if someone want to use ZFS now, FreeBSD or Linux is the way to go. It's very sad to see the OS where ZFS was invented no longer fit as a ZFS host system anymore. I found the state of Illumos now is frozen in time, they only try to build it with new GCC to keep it alive but don't have the ability to move it ahead.
Disclaimer: I've no relationship with Solaris, though. I've never used it in the past and will not consider using it in the future, given it state now. The system is not difficult to use, though. I could update, search and install packages with pkg after reading OpenIndiana's Wiki and install Joyent's pkgsrc binary packages with pkgin. I don't know how to do other administrative jobs, though. The documentation is severely lacked comparing to FreeBSD, sometime I've to fall back to Oracle's Solaris 10 documents, Oracle's also harder to read and understand for a noob like me, FreeBSD handbook is much easier. Don't get me wrong, I found Linux to be the most user friendly. I would definitely prefer free -m over vmstat.