ZFS on Netbook

S

sandman01

I have a Lenovo S10 netbook (It is an older box). I wanted to experiment with FreeBSD 10 and ZFS on the laptop. The laptop has an Intel ATOM processor with a clock speed of 1.6GHZ. The laptop only has 2 gigabytes of RAM installed in it. I was wondering if this is feasible to use ZFS on root. The netbook is only used for lightweight web browsing and console applications.

Thank you for your time.
 
I forgot to include that the hard drive size is 160 gigabytes, but I can always add another one in it. Perhaps bigger, but I do not want anything higher than 500 megabytes in it as it would be a waste.
 
The hard drive size is fine. For ZFS use, 4G of memory is usually recommended. Some people report that they have used ZFS with as little as 1G, but it may require special tuning.
 
I use ZFS on my laptop with 2GB of memory and it works pretty good upto now.
The ARC usually comes in around 1GB, but I am currently still in the "build all things I would need" step, so I can not say how this is going to work with picture processing, video work, compiling, place and route or such things.

You may want to enable compression to the file system pretty liberally, it has an early-bail-out function which stops compression when no gain is in sight, but otherwise it only gives benefits.

Edit: And before you hit the brick wall, please do not enable compression for the place the kernel lives in. You may find it will boot, work nicely - untill you do the first update.
 
My previous server was only capable of handling 2 GB but it ran ZFS just fine without any special tuning. Don't expect stellar performance though, but for normal desktop operations it should work fine.
 
If the CPU supports 64-bit, then 2 GB will run fine without any manual tuning.

If the CPU only supports 32-bit, then you will need to do some manual tuning to make it work with only 2 GB. Mainly to limit the ARC and to increase the kmem_max.
 
Thank you for all of your replies. I had a couple of random reboots for some reason and I am getting more information regarding that. I think I have it figured out by now. I did some tweaks and found out periodic daily was triggering it. I modified some settings and it did not reboot. ZFS is awesome by the way.
 
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