[OmniOS-discuss] NBD on OmniOS

[Jim Klimov]

On 2013-08-27 08:46, Michael Mounteney wrote:
> Network Block Device server.  Can't find it in any published repo.

Isn't iSCSI the same - only better?
I am not sure there are linux-type NBDs in Solaris family at all.

> I'm using a diskless thin client workstation with NFS root and want to
> experiment with alternatives as it's pretty slow.

Did you analyze why it is slow? Different NFS versions may perform
differently (i.e. NFSv4 may be slower than older ones), or network
related settings (from low-level up to NFS transfer sizes) may be
suboptimal.

Also, the ZFS pool backing the NFS server may be slow to write (all
NFS I/O is sync, and you may require an SSD log device to speed this
up - seek dtrace scripts that would help you analyze beforehand if
you have any sync IO that may be the culprit, or temporarily disable
sync I/O on the datasets which serve your NFS roots and subjectively
"feel" if things improve or not). If the sync IO is the problem, then
likely a responsible block-based system (like iSCSI and ZFS) would
also do sync updates and suffer the same lags.

HTH,
//Jim