Re: ZFS in Buster
On 6/6/2019 8:09 PM, Aron Xu wrote:
> Key interest in the thread is getting some insights about how to deal
> with the awkward situation that affects ZFS experience dramatically -
> Linux will remove those symbols in LTS kernel release, although
> in-kernel symbols are never promised to be stable. I've been in touch
> with ZoL upstream to listen to their plans and wishes, so that we
> (Debian ZoL people) can take actions that serve best for our users and
> community.
I will note that in terms of prior art Debian has in the past always
prioritized freeness over performance. Whenever there are binary blobs
involved to improve performance, we opted not to ship them unless they
could be reproduced using free software and have their source included.
Of course in that case people were still free to install the binary
blobs from non-free, assuming that the blob was in fact distributable.
This would not be the case here. But crippling the performance would be
indeed an option, even though this would make Debian much less relevant
for ZFS deployments and people would just go and use Ubuntu instead.
Still, crippling performance would still provide a lever and motivation
for upstream to come up with a way to disable the FPU on every supported
architecture one by one (if only on the most important one), even if
it's brittle and hacky. I personally wonder why a kernel which provides
a module interface does not provide a way to save FPU state, but alas,
they made their decision.
In the great scheme of things doing things the slow way has forced
certain progress to happen in the past when it was painful enough. The
question I wonder is if we are relevant enough here to push the needle
or if essentially all other distributions (say Ubuntu) will dare not to
follow upstream here and carry a patch forever.
Kind regards
Philipp Kern
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