64 bit only FreeNAS distributions?

[jkh]

You've now just indicated that the sources are derived from TrueOS. Fair enough. Then the question becomes, what's the delta between TrueOS and FreeBSD?

It's all in git (both FreeBSD and TrueOS) - I suggest diffing the repos for an answer to that question since it can't be answered any other way; the difference changes on a day to day basis depending on what's being committed into both repos and/or upstreamed into FreeBSD.

 

[jgreco]

Wow, talk about totally missing the point. If I wanted to know "what are all the line by line code differences between FreeBSD and TrueOS", then that'd be a good answer. My question is more of a "wtf is the point of TrueOS". I'm trying to understand the development decisions that cause FreeNAS not to simply mirror FreeBSD. I'm pretty sure "diff" won't get me that. That's why I said:

[...] rather than just diff'ing code trees and trying to read tea leaves, it seems to make sense to just ask the decisionmakers.

 

[jkh]

Wow, talk about totally missing the point. If I wanted to know "what are all the line by line code differences between FreeBSD and TrueOS", then that'd be a good answer. My question is more of a "wtf is the point of TrueOS". I'm trying to understand the development decisions that cause FreeNAS not to simply mirror FreeBSD. I'm pretty sure "diff" won't get me that. That's why I said:

Sorry, I missed that bit. I couldn't say what the original justification was - that decision was made long before I arrived on the scene.

 

[jgreco]

Yes, fine, but for those of us with an outsider's view, it'd still be nice to know what TrueOS is all about. Going back to the idea of just running a diff, I can maybe tell some certain stuff through the process of reading tea leaves. One would assume, for example, that I would find TrueNAS was based off TrueOS. And TrueOS is some sort of FreeBSD spinoff. We've seen that the featureset present in some of FreeNAS 8 differed (ZFS v28, etc) from FreeBSD's stable version. I might be able to infer that TrueOS is (or is not) exclusively used for TrueNAS. I know iX does other server-y things. Is TrueOS used elsewhere? What's the code import policy? Is it just a locked-down version of FreeBSD designed to avoid inadvertent issues from being introduced? (this is my best guess, incidentally). There was some evidence through the 8 release cycle that some bits - particularly userland - did not seem to be keeping up to date with FreeBSD 8 stable, while device drivers were kept up to date, ZFS was actively migrated to v28 ahead of FreeBSD, and other "critical bits" were tweaked and twiddled. This leads to slow code divergence but of course that /could/ be manageable and even desirable in some cases. Being slow to adopt new code allows others to discover brokenness, after all. Basically it'd be interesting and useful (but not mandatory) to understand a little more about the relationship between FreeNAS and FreeBSD.

It isn't actually necessary for me to know the answers, but it would be helpful. I occasionally base answers to questions here using information sourced from FreeBSD resources. Unlike most of the forum users here, who merely have a NAS box, I come from that heavy FreeBSD based service provider background. I'm kind of used to digging through the innards to find what I need. But FreeNAS can surprise me at times because of the differences, and because there's this sort of opaque blob sitting between FreeBSD and FreeNAS which I guess I have to label "iX development process".

Just wishing for some X-ray vision I guess.

 

[DrKK]

I know you guys have moved onto other things in this thread, but I wanted to voice my vote.

I think the 64-bit-only thing is a no-brainer. Obviously yes. Let those with older hardware download the last available 32-bit version.

As for the RAM limit, I think that's preposterous. I can't imagine fascistly locking down the install because someone doesn't have enough RAM. Anyone that's done their due diligence knows that if they aren't using at least 8GB or ECC RAM, then they are taking their chances. If anyone with worse RAM than this comes in the forum looking for help, we can just ignore them, on the ground that we "told them so". Forcibly locking it down is not the right way to proceed, and seems like a spectacularly short-sighted business decision.

That's just my view--trying to be helpful. I say 64-bit only, and at worst, a STRONGLY WORDED CAVEAT for anyone that attempts to install FreeNAS on a memory-starved system, but certainly no REQUIREMENT to have a certain amount of RAM.

 

[jkh]

Just to be clear: No one was ever suggesting that we *disable* systems with low RAM, at least I didn't parse any of the suggestions that way. All we've ever talked about in our engineering meetings is putting up a warning dialogs when you go to install (for *really* low memory configurations that won't even run django) or, for slightly beefier systems that are still below the ZFS performance threshold, when a ZFS pool is created.

 

[DrKK]

Well that's good news. I certainly was reading some of the suggestions' language that a certain amount of RAM would be required to make the install and/or create a ZFS pool.

If it's just a stern warning, that makes perfect sense, and I'm not sure on what ground people would object to a warning.

 

[Yatti420]

I would be ok with x64 builds only from now on.. I do have an x86 build at my parents however.. I would disable ZFS on 32 bit minimum.. Add warnings for low ram.. If the plan is to release one single image with both x86/x64 i'm ok with that in order to move forward.. Ceasing x86 in the middle of a product cycle isn't what I would do.. Wait til next major release I guess v10? and then remove x86.. I still think 9.1.1 needs some sprucing before I would call x86 quits..

 

[Nindustries]

As freenas is mainly focussed on ZFS, I wouldnt mind dropping support for 32-bit.

- Sent from mobile.

 

[emk2203]

I'll add, informationally, that some of the kernel parameters are what I'd consider "horrifyingly high" in FreeNAS, but this is largely a side effect of my being a product of the days when 32MB was a maxed out FreeBSD server (yay 486!) and even today many of our general service machines operate on 256MB. I feel reasonably certain that some of the problems experienced with panics are directly the result of tuning choices that are aimed at (and pretty good at) making large FreeNAS systems just magically work. The downside seems to be that once you get below 8GB, you're dangerously tight on memory.

The takeaway from that is that it's probably quite possible to have a FreeNAS system that's totally fine with ZFS at 4GB or maybe even 2GB, but it would require at a minimum some tuning, and quite possibly a different kernel image, depending on whether or not there are wired-in tunables that cannot be batted around in loader.conf.

Just anecdotal: I had a ZFS NAS system under Solaris running on a Atom 330 board with 2 GB (the maximum memory) for two years. Pool was 4x2 TB.
I had a kernel panic once, but it was a piece of cake to recover with ZFS's inbuilt rollback mechanisms. I won't challenge Cyberjock's observations from the forums here, but my system ran happily for two years, and the one kernel panic was a piece of cake to recover from.

Is that due to it running on FreeBSD / nanoBSD that the memory requirements are so high? Or are people just panicking and doing the wrong things when problems arise?

To stay on topic: Go x64 (had this even back in 2009 with the Atom 330), memory requirements - not sure about. Maybe just a warning that 2 - 6 GB might cause problems later on.

 

[jgreco]

The ZFS memory management is different under FreeBSD than under Solaris. Additionally, the FreeBSD kernel in FreeNAS has been tuned for large systems, which artificially stresses small memory systems. An experienced admin familiar with tuning FreeBSD and ZFS would have no problem tuning FreeNAS for a small memory system, but since FreeNAS is not really targeted towards that, it does not ship that way.

 

[cyberjock]

What jgreco said. I'll agree if you do other OSes your results can vary. My observations are solely based on FreeNAS since that's all we really support here. I'd call you crazy if you used 2GB of RAM on FreeNAS. But from what I hear that kind of "run of the mill" on Solaris. I'm not too privy to the precise things that are different between FreeBSD/FreeNAS and Solaris. I just know that the comparison is pretty much apples to oranges.

 

[matto]

Yes, fine, but for those of us with an outsider's view, it'd still be nice to know what TrueOS is all about. Going back to the idea of just running a diff, I can maybe tell some certain stuff through the process of reading tea leaves. One would assume, for example, that I would find TrueNAS was based off TrueOS. And TrueOS is some sort of FreeBSD spinoff. We've seen that the featureset present in some of FreeNAS 8 differed (ZFS v28, etc) from FreeBSD's stable version. I might be able to infer that TrueOS is (or is not) exclusively used for TrueNAS. I know iX does other server-y things. Is TrueOS used elsewhere? What's the code import policy? Is it just a locked-down version of FreeBSD designed to avoid inadvertent issues from being introduced? (this is my best guess, incidentally). There was some evidence through the 8 release cycle that some bits - particularly userland - did not seem to be keeping up to date with FreeBSD 8 stable, while device drivers were kept up to date, ZFS was actively migrated to v28 ahead of FreeBSD, and other "critical bits" were tweaked and twiddled. This leads to slow code divergence but of course that /could/ be manageable and even desirable in some cases. Being slow to adopt new code allows others to discover brokenness, after all. Basically it'd be interesting and useful (but not mandatory) to understand a little more about the relationship between FreeNAS and FreeBSD.

It isn't actually necessary for me to know the answers, but it would be helpful. I occasionally base answers to questions here using information sourced from FreeBSD resources. Unlike most of the forum users here, who merely have a NAS box, I come from that heavy FreeBSD based service provider background. I'm kind of used to digging through the innards to find what I need. But FreeNAS can surprise me at times because of the differences, and because there's this sort of opaque blob sitting between FreeBSD and FreeNAS which I guess I have to label "iX development process".

Just wishing for some X-ray vision I guess.

I'm late to the party but thought I would chime in on this subject.

It's pretty much exactly as you suspected. TrueOS is the basis for PC-BSD and FreeNAS. It cuts the edge between must have cherry-picks and 'whoa, better wait & see'. Basically, allowing us to keep, give, or backport changes before or after they are in FreeBSD official. Of course, almost all of our work ends up in FreeBSD anyway but this way we control the flow a bit better. Sometimes, the FreeBSD Project is not ready or willing to commit or backport something or they have not released yet but we need changes now.

-matt

 

[jgreco]

Thanks, that is helpful. :)

 

[matto]

Thanks, that is helpful. :)

Sure. Actually, the name was originally PC-BSD Server, so that should give you an idea of the purpose. You can grab a PC-BSD install CD and you'll see the option to install TrueOS (the server edition). It's FreeBSD with hugs :D

 

[jgreco]

Don't worship false OS's, give praise to the one TrueOS....

 

[TheSmoker]

Still FreeBSD in there ...

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD

 

[jpaetzel]

For what it's worth, while 32 bit is still around, it gets very little attention short of actually building unless someone opens a bug that says X and Y is broken on 32bit. To be honest I'm not certain end to end testing was done on any features of the 32bit 9.2.0-BETA.

So whether we provide the images or not, they are already second class citizens. I'm a fan of do it well or don't do it.

 

[maurertodd]

I'm fine giving up 32bit. I'm running the 64bit version on two NAS servers. One has 4GB installed the other 3GB. So I for one would be opposed to a 8GB restriction.

To others' point about the video "card" stealing memory, I have that issue on both my boxes. It isn't because I have a video card in my boxes, but because I DON'T have a dedicated video card in my boxes. That means the BIOS steals a bit of RAM to use with the on-board video. So limiting it to an even 3GB or even an even 2GB I think would be a disservice to those of us recycling our older gear as NAS boxes.

Do I have datacenter quality gear? Of course not. But I don't dedupe and all I'm doing is running household backups and serving an iTunes library. To be honest I was running satisfactorily with ZFS on 8.2 with 1GB. Maybe 9.1 (and 9.2) wouldn't run with 1GB of RAM but I know 64 bit 9.1 runs fine for my needs with slightly less than 3GB available. I'd even be willing to pull some memory if it would add value.