Netgate SG-1100 USF/ZFS
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We have recently picked up an SG-1100 for testing as a VPN concentrator and I have noticed this device is reporting a UFS file system. I was under the impression that ZFS was the path forward. Is there a particular reason that the factory image is using UFS? Perhaps this is a limitation of UBoot? I know UBoot directly support ext and fat but I would think you could "chain load" into a ZFS compatible loader.
Can anyone office some insight to this?
P.S. Im new to the ARM world so please forgive any misunderstandings or incorrect assumptions.
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Its only got 1GB of ram and eMMC, I wouldn't think ZFS would make much sense to be honest..
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I would be more interested in the COW robustness than anything else. I'll be honest though, I don't know about the memory requirements of ZFS with primarycache=metadata or primarycache=none. My understanding was the move to ZFS was to help prevent corruption with UFS defaulting to non-journaled.
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Further thinking reminds me that the ARC is claimable under memory pressure. You would only need* enough RAM for the outstanding TXGs and that would only need to be enough to support the max write speed of the emmc times the length of a TXG if I remember correctly. Again, I'm not an expert.
5 seconds is the default TXG timeout with two TXG open at a time that's 2x5x20MB=200MB. I can't imagine a case where I would need more write throughput than that (20MB/s). Also for additional resilience, you could enable sync writes and remove almost all memory requirements at the cost of garbage write performance.
Once more I'm not an expert so I may have a mangled understanding of ZFS.
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UFS is still the default and far more tested. ZFS on x86 is pretty well tested though and will likely become the default relatively soon. On ARM though it's untested (by us) AFAIK. There's no easy way to test it either it would require a new image.
Steve
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I would be a willing test subject! I have an SG-1100 and an ESPRESSObin that I could test a community version on
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We would likely start on the SG-3100 as it has m.2 SATA slots. But I'll let you know if anything becomes available for testing.
I doubt it will be before 2.5 though.
Steve
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Is there any update on ZFS for ARM devices?
I have quite a few Netgate SG-3100’s deployed - it would be nice to get ZFS onto these (mainly for resilience to sudden reboots).
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I'm not aware of any plans to do so at this time. I'll ask.
Steve
