June 04, 2020

353: ZFS on Ironwolf

38 minutes

Scheduling in NetBSD, ZFS vs. RAID on Ironwolf disks, OpenBSD on Microsoft Surface Go 2, FreeBSD for Linux sysadmins, FreeBSD on Lenovo T480, and more.

NOTES

This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap

Headlines

Scheduling in NetBSD – Part 1

In this blog, we will discuss about the 4.4BSD Thread scheduler one of the two schedulers in NetBSD and a few OS APIs that can be used to control the schedulers and get information while executing.

ZFS versus RAID: Eight Ironwolf disks, two filesystems, one winner

This has been a long while in the making—it's test results time. To truly understand the fundamentals of computer storage, it's important to explore the impact of various conventional RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) topologies on performance. It's also important to understand what ZFS is and how it works. But at some point, people (particularly computer enthusiasts on the Internet) want numbers.

If you want to hear more from Jim, he has a new bi-weekly podcast with Allan and Joe Ressington over at 2.5admins.com

News Roundup

OpenBSD on the Microsoft Surface Go 2

I used OpenBSD on the original Surface Go back in 2018 and many things worked with the big exception of the internal Atheros WiFi. This meant I had to keep it tethered to a USB-C dock for Ethernet or use a small USB-A WiFi dongle plugged into a less-than-small USB-A-to-USB-C adapter.

FreeBSD UNIX for Linux sysadmins

If you’ve ever installed and explored another Linux distro (what Linux sysadmin hasn’t?!?), then exploring FreeBSD is going be somewhat similar with a few key differences.

While there is no graphical installation, the installation process is straightforward and similar to installing a server-based Linux distro. Just make sure you choose the local_unbound package when prompted if you want to cache DNS lookups locally, as FreeBSD doesn’t have a built-in local DNS resolver that does this.

Following installation, the directory structure is almost identical to Linux. Of course, you’ll notice some small differences here and there (e.g. regular user home directories are located under /usr/home instead of /home). Standard UNIX commands such as ls, chmod, find, which, ps, nice, ifconfig, netstat, sockstat (the ss command in Linux) are exactly as you’d expect, but with some different options here and there that you’ll see in the man pages. And yes, reboot and poweroff are there too.

FreeBSD on the Lenovo Thinkpad T480

Recently I replaced my 2014 MacBook Air with a Lenovo Thinkpad T480, on which I've installed FreeBSD, currently 12.1-RELEASE. This page documents my set-up along with various configuration tweaks and fixes.

Tarsnap

This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups.

Feedback/Questions

Benjamin - ZFS Question

Brad - swap_pager_getswapspace errors

Brandon - gaming

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