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> But updates and Linux are very prone to breakages - there’s too much hw and sw combinations to expect solid experience. That seems like FUD to me. I am runni

by jnxx 6y ago

> But updates and Linux are very prone to breakages - there’s too much hw and sw combinations to expect solid experience. That seems like FUD to me. I am running Linux since over 20 years. A NAS's hardware interfaces are mostly HDD and network drivers, and I have not seen them breaking in many years. And especially for PC-platform hardware, or ARM SoC in which Linux is the dominant OS. I could understand if NAS vendors would say that in their advertisement, but what is the substance of claims like this? Especially since these things runs Linux as well.

vetinari 6y ago
There are way more things that can go wrong, not just drivers. I've run a ThinkServe machine with CentOS and ZFS for several years. Kernel and ZFS updates would break it regularly, requiring tinkering to make it work again (my favorite: zfs#8885). Nowadays I prefer when somebody else did the integration work.
- jnxx 6y ago
  Well, I see better what point of view this is coming from. However, ZEF is not part of the standard kernel, IIRC there are still license issues and it needs to be built separately, which is not necessary with any normal file system. I enjoy some amount of tinkering, too, but I believe it is expecting too much that everything works out of the box with non-standard kernel modules. In the same vein, I also do not understand entirely why people want to have something still experimental like btrfs precisely on their NAS, and apparently use that without an extra load of backups. btrfs has many qualities, but it is still not considered as robust as ext4 (the current standard Linux file system), and for a long time it had practically no recovery option if file system data became corrupt. For me, it is very clearly not the first choice for a NAS or server which should run completely hassle-free. IMO, everything one needs for that is on Debian stable, so why not use that? And why in heaven should one make oneself dependent on what a specific hardware vendor does?
  - vetinari 6y ago
    The nice think about RHEL/CentOS is, that their kernels have stable ABIs (kABI). That allows for third parties to provide binary kernel modules, and the OpenZFS project actually provides the kABI-kmod tracking repo, so you can have an installation without any developer tools installed (which I prefer). So the problem wasn't really with kernel modules, the problem was the integration with the system, and nobody really cared - the above mentioned issue is still open, 2 years later. Another nice thing about CentOS is, that it was supported for 10 years. Debian is supported only for 3. It tkaes 5 years for Synology to get a new release done, so they also do have kinda-long term support.
  - KozmoNau7 6y ago
    Btrfs is stable and has been widely used in production for years. Facebook uses it, SUSE CaaS uses it, the officially recommended platform for SAP is SLES, which has defaulted to btrfs for the root filesystem since 2014. Btrfs brings snapshots, rollback, deduplication, storage pools, checksumming, send/receive and a whole host of other features. It's a completely different type of filesystem to ext4. Calling btrfs "experimental" at this point is like calling electric cars "experimental".

by jnxx 6y ago

vetinari 6y ago

There are way more things that can go wrong, not just drivers. I've run a ThinkServe machine with CentOS and ZFS for several years. Kernel and ZFS updates would break it regularly, requiring tinkering to make it work again (my favorite: zfs#8885). Nowadays I prefer when somebody else did the integration work.

jnxx 6y ago
Well, I see better what point of view this is coming from. However, ZEF is not part of the standard kernel, IIRC there are still license issues and it needs to be built separately, which is not necessary with any normal file system. I enjoy some amount of tinkering, too, but I believe it is expecting too much that everything works out of the box with non-standard kernel modules. In the same vein, I also do not understand entirely why people want to have something still experimental like btrfs precisely on their NAS, and apparently use that without an extra load of backups. btrfs has many qualities, but it is still not considered as robust as ext4 (the current standard Linux file system), and for a long time it had practically no recovery option if file system data became corrupt. For me, it is very clearly not the first choice for a NAS or server which should run completely hassle-free. IMO, everything one needs for that is on Debian stable, so why not use that? And why in heaven should one make oneself dependent on what a specific hardware vendor does?
- vetinari 6y ago
  The nice think about RHEL/CentOS is, that their kernels have stable ABIs (kABI). That allows for third parties to provide binary kernel modules, and the OpenZFS project actually provides the kABI-kmod tracking repo, so you can have an installation without any developer tools installed (which I prefer). So the problem wasn't really with kernel modules, the problem was the integration with the system, and nobody really cared - the above mentioned issue is still open, 2 years later. Another nice thing about CentOS is, that it was supported for 10 years. Debian is supported only for 3. It tkaes 5 years for Synology to get a new release done, so they also do have kinda-long term support.
- KozmoNau7 6y ago
  Btrfs is stable and has been widely used in production for years. Facebook uses it, SUSE CaaS uses it, the officially recommended platform for SAP is SLES, which has defaulted to btrfs for the root filesystem since 2014. Btrfs brings snapshots, rollback, deduplication, storage pools, checksumming, send/receive and a whole host of other features. It's a completely different type of filesystem to ext4. Calling btrfs "experimental" at this point is like calling electric cars "experimental".