[KDE/Mac] Apple Mac server (was Another round of success)

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Friday May 29 2015 07:58:42 Bradley Giesbrecht wrote:

> 
> I would expect a low end off the self Mini without virtualization would perform as well or better then the above vm guest.

I take it that intensive building is an application that would justify an i7?

> That said, the "Fusion" drive is nice, the OS takes care of joining the disks and moving data to the SSD that most benefits performance. I am not aware of any Fusion control parameters exposed but the performance is very good from my experience.

Of course: interactive IO is basically handled via the SSD.

> 
> A stock middle tier Mini cost $699 US and upgrading to a Fussion drive raises the cost to $899 US.

Just for the record: a Fusion drive is not something you can add as an aftermarket option, to my knowledge. It's a regular HDD combined with on-board (probably soldered) flash storage.
Does anybody on the KDE team have experience with setting up ZFS storage for performance, meaning with fast (SSD) disk(s) to act as the log ZDEV for a ZVOL. Yes, it exists for OS X, and I've heard claims that when done right it outperforms most other filesystems, and when used with sync=disabled I'm actually willing to believe that (disabled here means that you might lose some data in case of a power outage within 10s of a write). The fs also has other advantages; I could imagine that it might be useful on a CI server to create a new dataset ("partition") for the build directory each time a project is built, discarding it after a successful build (which is a lot faster than an `rm -rf`).

> It can and does with OSXBUILDER mentioned above.
> I volunteer to help configure any Mac hardware KDE deploys.

Actually using the GUI can be a patience-honing exercise when done from halfway across the world (Bradley is in California if I am not mistaken) :)

Would you be capable of checking if one of those VMs runs in VirtualBox on Linux?

R.