Hello Richard,
Monish Shah wrote:
What about when the compression is performed in dedicated hardware?
Shouldn't compression be on by default in that case? How do I put in an
RFE for that?
Is there a bugs.intel.com? :-)
I may have misled you. I'm not asking for Intel to add hardware
compression. Actually, we already have gzip compression boards that we have
integrated into OpenSolaris / ZFS and they are also supported under
NexentaStor. What I'm saying is that if such a card is installed,
compression should be enabled by default.
NB, Solaris already does this for encryption, which is often a more
computationally intensive operation.
Actually, compression is more compute intensive than symmetric encryption
(such as AES).
Public key encryption, on the other hand, is horrendously compute intensive,
much more than compression or symmectric encryption. But, nobody uses
public key encryption for bulk data encryption, so that doesn't apply.
Your mileage may vary. You can always come up with compression algorithms
that don't do a very good job of compressing, but which are light on CPU
utilization.
Monish
I think the general cases are performed well by current hardware, and
it is already multithreaded. The bigger issue is, as Bob notes, resource
management. There is opportunity for people to work here, especially
since the community has access to large amounts of varied hardware.
Should we spin up a special interest group of some sort?
-- richard
_______________________________________________
zfs-discuss mailing list
zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org
http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
