6 ms·

DKMS is an awful user experience, it's an easy way to render a system unbootable. I hope Linus doesn't force existing users, like me, down that path. It's why I

DKMS is an awful user experience, it's an easy way to render a system unbootable. I hope Linus doesn't force existing users, like me, down that path. It's why I avoid zfs, however good it may be.

mroche 1y ago
DKMS isn't a "fire and forget" kind of tool, but it comes reasonably close most of the time. I would say it's a far cry from awful, though.
- webstrand 1y ago
  I think my problem is that it's just close enough to being fire-and-forget that I forget how to do the recovery when it misfires. It usually seems to crop up when I'm on vacation or something and I don't have my tools.
yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
One of my machines runs root on ZFS via DKMS. I will grant that it is annoying, and it used to be worse, but I don't think it's been quite as bad as all that for a very long time. I would also argue that it's more acceptable for testing actively developed stuff that's getting the bugs worked out in order to work towards mainlining. That said, I vaguely seem to recall that bcachefs ended up involving changes to other parts of the kernel to better support it; if that's true then DKMS is likely to be much more painful if not outright impossible. It's fine to compile one module (or even several) against a normal kernel, but the moment you have to patch parts of the "main" kernel it's gonna get messy.
krageon 1y ago
ZFS should be avoided because it has too many dumb complete failure states (having run it in a real production storage environment), not because it's DKMS
- cyberpunk 1y ago
  I’ve run racks and racks of it in prod also. What are these dumb complete failure states you mean?
queenkjuul 1y ago
Yeah idk 5+ years now of ZFS on Linux for me without a single hiccup (other than me letting a drive die that wasn't properly backed up). The modules get rebuilt when the distro installs a new kernel. I've never once even had to think about it.

DKMS is an awful user experience, it's an easy way to render a system unbootable. I hope Linus doesn't force existing users, like me, down that path. It's why I avoid zfs, however good it may be.

mroche 1y ago

DKMS isn't a "fire and forget" kind of tool, but it comes reasonably close most of the time. I would say it's a far cry from awful, though.

webstrand 1y ago
I think my problem is that it's just close enough to being fire-and-forget that I forget how to do the recovery when it misfires. It usually seems to crop up when I'm on vacation or something and I don't have my tools.

yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago

One of my machines runs root on ZFS via DKMS. I will grant that it is annoying, and it used to be worse, but I don't think it's been quite as bad as all that for a very long time. I would also argue that it's more acceptable for testing actively developed stuff that's getting the bugs worked out in order to work towards mainlining. That said, I vaguely seem to recall that bcachefs ended up involving changes to other parts of the kernel to better support it; if that's true then DKMS is likely to be much more painful if not outright impossible. It's fine to compile one module (or even several) against a normal kernel, but the moment you have to patch parts of the "main" kernel it's gonna get messy.

krageon 1y ago

ZFS should be avoided because it has too many dumb complete failure states (having run it in a real production storage environment), not because it's DKMS

cyberpunk 1y ago
I’ve run racks and racks of it in prod also. What are these dumb complete failure states you mean?

queenkjuul 1y ago

Yeah idk 5+ years now of ZFS on Linux for me without a single hiccup (other than me letting a drive die that wasn't properly backed up). The modules get rebuilt when the distro installs a new kernel. I've never once even had to think about it.