ZFS Design

Posted Sep 20, 2013 11:49 UTC (Fri) by cortana (subscriber, #24596)
In reply to: ZFS Design by Lennie
Parent article: The OpenZFS project launches

Not sure about binaries, but there exist systems (DKMS) that build modules during package installation, so from the end-user's point of view this doesn't matter. Debian has a forthcoming zfs-linux package that I'll be using as soon as it's available.

ZFS Design

Posted Sep 20, 2013 12:02 UTC (Fri) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link] (1 responses)

Do installers install DKMS packages ? I'm not aware of any that do (would surprise me if they did, I guess in theory it could do that in a chroot maybe).

So if binaries can't be distributed and the installer doesn't support DKMS packages then the result will be it will never be the default filesystem.

ZFS Design

Posted Sep 30, 2013 15:23 UTC (Mon) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

Not sure why installers can't install DKMS packages. In Debian the base 'dkms' support package depends on the stuff necessary to build modules, so installing foo-dkms will pull in the compiler and kernel headers automatically.

IIRC you can install Debian inside VirtualBox and you'll end up with a system including virtualbox-guest-dkms without any user intervention.

ZFS Design

Posted Sep 28, 2013 17:49 UTC (Sat) by peschmae (guest, #32292) [Link] (1 responses)

Having used both OpenAFS and the binary Nvidia drivers - which both are built by aforementioneds system - I can safely say that those two are the things that break the most regularly when upgrading my system.

They do so for a variety of reasons, starting with "Kernel too new and not supported yet". The situation seems to have improved recently, but its still not as reliable as modules that just *are* in the kernel.

I would hesitate format / with a filesystem that is due to break at the next upgrade...

ZFS Design

Posted Sep 30, 2013 15:28 UTC (Mon) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

OTOH you know that when you are installing a new kernel you should wait for the out-of-tree modules to be updated.

I can't speak for the distribution you're using, but in Debian the kernel packages have an 'ABI number' embedded within them, so when you upgrade the kernel to apply e.g., a security fix you know you won't have to rebuild anything, let alone have to worry that you can't rebuild due to an API change.