Hello experts, A while back I've seen proposals on Linux kernel mailing lists to create RAID firmwares based on mdadm, and apparently some hardware vendors took to that. An added benefit for users was that RAID disks could be migrated between software and hardware RAID running same code, allowing for easier repairs, migrations and up/down-grades.
I remembered that idea and wondered: is it (at least theoretically) possible and efficient to separate some ZFS storage code and turn it into a RAID-adapter firmware code with all the good features? Currently ZFS opposes itself to existing RAID hardware, but basically turns a computer into one. Perhaps some code (a stripped-down OS, ZFS, CLI and maybe GUI) could executed on a dedicated piece of hardware (probably a board with limited RAM - thus most of caching should be done elsewhere - in the user's OS and main system RAM), so that any end-user OS (not only ones directly suppporting ZFS) would benefit from ZFS resiliency, snapshots, caching, etc. with the simplicity of using a RAID adapter's exported volumes. Now, it is just a thought. But I wonder if it's possible... Or useful? :) Or if anyone has already done that? //Jim Klimov _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
