I am about to try to use zfs for the first time and have a few questions. I have a machine that is running NetBSD-9/amd64 with 2 cores, 8G of RAM, a single 1T SSD, with a smallish root/swap/usr, and about 870 GiB free intended for zfs. I am heading for one po0l that is not raid at all. I'm not all that worried about transitions or stability; this is a build machine for packages, not particularly precious, and it being down for a week while I fix it is no big deal. I will likely pivot the machine to be xen dom0; I hope that doesn't matter much (other than 1 core only in the dom0). Or I might use nvmm, or both. I might add a spinning disk later, either internal or USB. (I realize that there, I probably want both ZIL and L2ARC on SSD. I would rather move bits later than do things now to ease that, since I do not have an actual plan.) My questions are: Is 9/current close enough to the same zfs code that it doesn't matter which I run? If I'm inclined to run current for other reasons, is that a bad idea zfs-wise? I understand that zfs has an intent log always, and that can be within the pool, or one can add a ZIL device. With the pool having one device which is an SSD, I see no point in partitioning off part of that SSD to be the ZIL. I understand that zfs has ARC in RAM, and can have L2ARC on disk. Given that the pool is on SSD, it seems pointless to split off some for L2ARC. My expected answers are: The code is basically the same and it doesn't really matter but probably current has some bugfixes 9 doesn't. There's no reason current is scary becuase of zfs. There is no point in a ZIL on the same SSD as the pool. There is really no point in L2ARC on the same SSD as the pool. Corrections/clues appreciated.
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