On Do, 2014-11-06 at 10:46 -0500, John Grasty via smartos-discuss wrote: > > That said, if *CPU* power consumption is a major factor, generally > > this is mostly automatic, as modern CPUs generally “race” to > > complete work so that they can enter deeper C states. However, deep C > > states have been known to be the cause of many problems in certain > > types of network appliance configurations, to the point that best > > practice is often to disable deep C states. (Again, in a data center > > environment, this isn’t a big deal.) > > I'm a newbie in the smartOS/illumos world. I have a FreeNAS mini (from > ixsystems) that I wanted to convert to a smartOS server for my home. > It's based on an Asrock C2750D4I motherboard with an 8-core Intel Avoton > C2750 CPU. It's a low power setup, and I thought that I would experiment > with reenabling deep C states to save even more. > > Yep. Less than 24 hours later fmd was alerting me to problems with > missed interrupts. (Wow! Fault management in illumos is amazing compared > to everything else that I have used--FreeBSD and Linux.) I reverted to > the stock configuration from SmartOS, and everything went back to > normal. The extra dollar or two a month for power is ok with me. > > Trust the experts that have responded (Keith W. and Garret D.). They > really do know what they are talking about. > > > Thanks, > John Grasty >
Thanks for that info. To put my search into perspecive (I skipped that part for brevity's sake, I see now that it is necessary), I am looking for a 24/7 private lab server with a low amount of "production load", namely, a virtualized pfSense firewall. That lab server should power several applications wich are normally absolute overhead for a SOHO setting, e.g. a log server, LDAP/Kerberos and so on for me to experiment with. As it is a home and/or lab setting, the system will be mostely idling. Because I want low-overhead virtualization, that leaves me with Solaris Zones and FreeBSD jails. I do not have experience with that Linux LXE stuff and am (perhaps unfairly so, but I have been bitten) deeply suspcicious of Linuxes. In addition, being a lab server, I sometimes need a hypervisor based virtualization for testing and at least in one instance for "production", i.e. the firewall. In the future I am thinking of a putting a very small DMZ on that thing, so I need excellent network virtualization. That points at first on something Solaris based (Zones, KVM, Crossbow) and maybe with some fiddling at FreeBSD (Jails, BeHyVe [???] and netmap [???]). Software-wise I am more happy with FreeBSD ports, but pkgsrc is an option and then I need to learn something. OK, there are worse things. I perfectly understand that the low power issue is an absolute non-issue for SmartOSes datacenter application ecological niche. However, I think for what I plan to do, SmartOS is ideal as well, save for all these complications with power. 30W to 40W are OK, 80W way to much. I am living in Germany and we play "Energiewende" here (electricity just comes out of the wall and we can switch off all nuclear or coal fueled power plants), so electricity is expensive and I expect prices to rise. So I hope that puts my crazy quest a bit into perspective and makes it sound less crazy. @John: I trust that you do not use the six additional SATA ports powered by that Marvell controllers, of those I experienced one not to work and have read about the other being unspoorted (OpenIndiana HCL). Am I reading you correctly? Another question: Have you enanbeld and then disabled C-power states in BIOS or systemwise on SmartOS? Regardless of which option, which states do you use? In any case, many many thanks for that pointer at the Asrock board, I would not have thought about something that highly powered, but I think that is the right option. @Keith and @Garret: Many, many thanks for your helpful critique of my ideas and for mentioning these failures I would have run in sometime in the future. Many thanks and cheers, have a nice weekend! -- Christopher ------------------------------------------- smartos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/184463/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/184463/25769125-55cfbc00 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=25769125&id_secret=25769125-7688e9fb Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
