ZFS second look

I thought I'd see if I could improve performance by compiling my own ZFS. I pulled the source from the ZFS-Fuse site, edited the make files for O3 instead of O2. Byte rates jumped to 90MB/sec at only 45% CPU. I don't know what options the original APT package was compiled with, but mine's faster. The binaries are four times the size of the originals, but significantly faster.

ZFS on Linux

ZFS on linux. I love ZFS, I do. There's no argument there.

But currently in runs in userspace on Linux, and performance is terrible. Copying from one non-ZFS disk to a new single-disk ZFS volume hit 50MB/sec, which isn't bad, but which soaked up 60% CPU on a 2.0GHz dual-core Core 2 Celeron.

Unfortunately LVM and MD don't do what I want, so I think ZFS is still the direction I'm going to go. Hopefully performance will improve in future releases. Or they'll find a way to get ZFS in the kernel.

I could install OpenSolaris, but my Solaris admin skills are beyond rusty. Between that and shitty driver support, OpenSolaris makes it pretty much a no-go.