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John Paul Wohlscheid over at It's FOSS takes a look at the ZFS file system and its capabilities. He mainly covers OpenZFS which is the fork made since Oracle bought and shut down Solaris which was the original host of ZFS. It features pooled storage with RAID-like capabilities, copy-on-write with snapshots, data integrity verification and automatic repair, and it can handle files up to 16 exabytes in size, with file systems of up to 256 quadrillion zettabytes in size should you have enough electricity to pull that off. Because it started development under a deliberately incompatible license, ZFS cannot be directly integrated in Linux. However, several distros work around that and provide packages for it. It has been ported to FreeBSD since 2008.
(Score: 1) by soylentnewsinator on Tuesday September 11 2018, @10:35PM (2 children)
I finally had to create an account. Gentoo was my primary OS back in 2004-2007. I later transitioned to Ubuntu as I found fewer things broke. (I'm not sure if that's the nature of a rolling release distro versus 6 months or 2 years depending on if you used LTS.) On and off, I've been using FreeBSD for various servers until a couple of years ago where I transitioned all my servers to FreeBSD due to ZFS support (and partially jails).
I see that Gentoo finally updated their web design. I recall they held a contest over 10 years ago, and despite a winner being selected, they cancelled the idea due to 'reasons'. That was a big red flag to me if their management would hold the contest and then change their mind as soon as a winner was selected.
Since I left Gentoo around the time you started using it, according to your experience, has the stability noticeably increased? Is there a recommendation of how frequently to upgrade if there's no security reason to do so? Is there a decent tool to update config files to new versions? (That hurt me numerous times in the past.) How often do packages break on you?
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday September 12 2018, @12:53PM
Breakage of config files? I've often thought config files should be checked into revision control with a vendor branch and a local branch, and that the installer should set this up. After installation it's too late, because the installer has already modified them. Maybe also an installer branch, intermediate between these two.
(Score: 2) by pendorbound on Wednesday September 12 2018, @03:10PM
I wouldn't say Gentoo has "improved" much in the intervening time. It's definitely the nature of the rolling release beast. Benefit is bleeding edge latest packages. Draw back is the blood on the edge is frequently your own...
The recommendation for upgrade frequency is, "early and often..."
The thing about updating Gentoo is it's uncomfortable, but the longer you go between updates, the more it hurts. If you hold off for security related only updates, there's a good chance major chunks of core system will have changed their structure since your last update. You'll have multiple conflicting packages you need to upgrade, big filesystem layout or config format changes, and your life's gonna suck for the next couple of days. If you're lucky, you can manually set version masks to upgrade in stages (assuming the intervening versions are still in the Portage tree). If not, you're manually fixing stuff, forcing versions to get around slot conflicts, etc. If you suck it up and do the updates regularly, you usually get the benefit of migration scripts to fix that stuff. The scripts are seldom maintained for more than a few version updates though. If you wait too long, you're on the wrong side of the gulf between the old & new way with no migration process to automate moving across.
It's been a while since I've left myself with an unbootable system & had to shove a recovery disc in, but it's happened... Especially with ZFS root, if you munge the ZFS driver in your initramfs, you're cooked. Keeping your previous kernel / initramfs images as alternates in GRUB is usually enough to get back to a usable system and clean up. Usually...
Configuration file changes are handled with dispatch-conf which is so-so. It gives you a diff of your original versus the proposed changes. The changes are always clobber-jobs. They don't attempt to apply only changes on top of your customizations, just replace whole files. Usually I end up either ignoring the changes and keeping my own or dropping into an editor (which dispatch-conf will facilitate) and hand-merge the changes. I'd love them to use something like Augeas for config migrations, but....
To be honest, I wouldn't use Gentoo with Portage in production. It's okay for my home stuff. Having latest versions of stuff that I don't have to `./configure && make && make install` is handy. For enterprise level reliability, I wouldn't recommend Gentoo/Portage. The only case I could see using Gentoo "for real" would be in an immutable VM situation where "upgrades" mean canning a new gold template and individualizing it into your various apps using Puppet or something. In that case, I wouldn't even include Portage or the portage tree. Just a super cut-down Linux install with the bare minimum for the app.