ZFS (highly experimental support)

ZFS provides a rich set of functionality but at a cost of extra resource usage. Currently ARC (Adaptive Replacement Cache) size is limited to min(256 MiB + 0.3% of total zpool size, 20% of system RAM) but at least 384 MiB. This RAM is included in the memory EVE reserves for its own operational needs. Thus would this memory not be available for allocation for applications.

If system does not have enough memory to satisfy the limit mentioned above, severe performance degradation can occur on random access workflows.

Performance tunings applied

primarycache=metadata - allows to keep arc cache size low. The primary use-case of zfs is zvol attached to a VM. And VM already does cache it's data, furthermore it knows better what to cache.

recordsize=16k - is a sweet spot between constantly having sub-blocks updates, and good compression ratio.

compression=zstd - is a less cpu intensive algorithm, with not too big compromise on compression ratio

redundant_metadata=most - will reduce the number of copies of the indirect blocks at the higher levels. This can greatly cut the amount of data that must be written, resulting in better performance.

Multiple tunables to better regulate how fast ZFS can accept requests. This along helped mediate maximum latency on parallel access with small ARC:

zfs_vdev_async_write_active_min_dirty_percent = 10
zfs_vdev_async_write_active_max_dirty_percent = 30
zfs_delay_min_dirty_percent = 40
zfs_delay_scale = 800000
zfs_dirty_data_max = 50% of zfs_arc_max
zfs_dirty_data_sync_percent = 15

The following tunables are hardcoded and are optimized values for SSD/NVMe based pools. Please note that these tunables may not work optimally for HDD based pools. WIP to dynamically adjust these parameters depending on the pool type.

zfs_vdev_sync_read_min_active = 35
zfs_vdev_sync_read_max_active = 35
zfs_vdev_sync_write_min_active = 35
zfs_vdev_sync_write_max_active = 35
zfs_vdev_async_read_min_active = 1
zfs_vdev_async_read_max_active = 10
zfs_vdev_async_write_min_active = 1
zfs_vdev_async_write_max_active = 10

Minimum recommended system requirements to install ZFS storage is 32GB memory and 3 physical disks set in eve_persist_disk. eve_install_skip_zfs_checks should be set in installation config to override the requirement check for experimental installs.