3 ms·

Honest question: what’s wrong with DKMS?

• saghm 1y ago
  I don't mind it for a lot of things, but I'm not sure how great an experience it is for something that needs to be installed as part of the initial setup of the system rather than something you can add afterwards. It works fine for stuff like a wifi or graphics driver if you're doing the initial installation without either of those, but for stuff like the filesystem that kind of has to be done up-front, it can lead to a weird bootstrapping problem where you need to have a way of getting the package before you've set up the system, but it's generally not available through the normal means that the installation media provides. You can go out of your way to obtain it elsewhere it, but that's a pretty noticeable downgrade in the experience of setting up a Linux system from what most people are used to, so I think it's understandable that the completely artificial barrier to having it available through conventional means would be frustrating for people.
  • creshal 1y ago
    Some distributions release ZFS kernel modules pinned for their kernel builds, so there's no bootstrapping problem in the first place. And the biggest issue really is that none of that would be necessary in the first place, if only btrfs or bcachefs were actually reliable.
• creshal 1y ago
  Nothing, other than FUD.
• MrDrMcCoy 1y ago
  > Honest question: what’s wrong with DKMS? Nothing is wrong with DKMS, but that's not enough. The problem is that it will often fail to build ZFS for updated kernels because the kernel changed something it uses. Sometimes that can happen within a release.