As Wolfgang Lonien recently pointed out , Solaris isn't the only systemwith ZFS, as you can also get it in at least FreeBSD. Despite theseports, I believe that Solaris generally remains your only solid choiceif you need ZFS.

The problem is that ZFS is currently incomplete, with both missingfeatures and significant problems . Thismeans that the work of integrating ZFS into other systems is notcomplete, and there are two potential issues with the remaining work.

The first is the most straightforward: you are taking

Here's something that I've seen illustrated more than once : layering buffering on top ofbuffering is almost always a bad idea .

One of the reasons is that it can be tricky to write a correct version.For example, consider all the things that you have to get right if youwrite a file IO buffering layer on Unix, including:

• you must remember that you've seen an EOF, and return this indicationto the next level up without doing another underlying read() .
• you must return

In an earlier entry I mentioned that theLinux kernel takes the top 1 gigabyte of a process's address space foritself. In fact this is not just address space that the kernel reservesfor its own use; the entire kernel itself actually lives in the topgigabyte of every process's memory map.

(You can't read it or run it because it is protected address space,accessible only when the system is in kernel mode, except for the VDSOit exports to processes these days.)

The

Courtesy of having an Eee around and being curious about how to maximizethe battery life, here are some measurements about what bits seems touse how much power. All of these measurements are for a '4G Surf' model;your mileage may vary on other ones.

First, a disclaimer: all of these measurements are made with a powermeter while the Eee was on wall power. It's possible that the Eeebehaves differently when running on battery power (although I wouldbe somewhat surprised).