J
jkh
Guest
Hi folks,
So, since the dawn of time FreeNAS has been released for both i386 and x86_64 architectures, and as much as this may have seemed "painless", it really hasn't been.
For each distribution we also require 64/32 bit PBIs, you see, and in FreeNAS trunk you'll notice that support for jail templates has also been added (so that custom jails can be supported, including linux jails). Each FreeBSD jail template must also be, of course, either 32 or 64 bit since you can't run a 64 bit jail on a 32 bit host.
It's becoming somewhat unsustainable from a release engineering perspective, and some plugins (like Plex) don't even support 32 bit environments because the upstream binary providers (in this case, Plex) are only providing 64 bit versions of their stuff.
ZFS is also memory hungry, as many folks in the forums have noted, and a 32 bit address limit really penalizes it here. So, to cut to the point: I would like to see what people think of the idea of going 64 bit only for future FreeNAS distributions. Folks with older hardware can always stick with FreeNAS 9.1.1, of course, as we're not going to pull the older distribution media or anything (and we can even commit to keeping the 32 bit plugins we built for 9.1.1 around for awhile), but it sure would make our lives easier to be able to just generate x86_64 binaries going forward!
Comments? Thanks!
So, since the dawn of time FreeNAS has been released for both i386 and x86_64 architectures, and as much as this may have seemed "painless", it really hasn't been.
For each distribution we also require 64/32 bit PBIs, you see, and in FreeNAS trunk you'll notice that support for jail templates has also been added (so that custom jails can be supported, including linux jails). Each FreeBSD jail template must also be, of course, either 32 or 64 bit since you can't run a 64 bit jail on a 32 bit host.
It's becoming somewhat unsustainable from a release engineering perspective, and some plugins (like Plex) don't even support 32 bit environments because the upstream binary providers (in this case, Plex) are only providing 64 bit versions of their stuff.
ZFS is also memory hungry, as many folks in the forums have noted, and a 32 bit address limit really penalizes it here. So, to cut to the point: I would like to see what people think of the idea of going 64 bit only for future FreeNAS distributions. Folks with older hardware can always stick with FreeNAS 9.1.1, of course, as we're not going to pull the older distribution media or anything (and we can even commit to keeping the 32 bit plugins we built for 9.1.1 around for awhile), but it sure would make our lives easier to be able to just generate x86_64 binaries going forward!
Comments? Thanks!