XEN i386 with PAE and zfs, trouble?

[Dr Josef Karthauser]

Hey there,

I've been asking these questions to the wrong list! Just found the xen list, so I'll recap here.

I want to run amd64 on xen, at a VPS hosting provider. Due to cost constraints the sweet spot in the cost/memory ratio has given me a provider who will only support a "ops_pv" kernel. This means that XENHVM on amd64 is not available to me.

The VPS provider will be giving me at least 6 gb of ram, and I want to run ZFS on the instance. This leaves me considering running the i386 kernel and relying on PAE to get access to the extra memory. I presume that I'll lose about 1.5-2gb of RAM to ZFS tuning, and hope that means that I'll have 4gb(-ish) available to userland processes.

Is this a sensible assumption? Can I rely on this being a stable configuration, or am I high?! :)

Thanks,
Joe