[telgareith]

DKMS solved these "licensing issues." Dell is mum on official motivation- but it provides a licensing demarcation point, and a way for kernels to update without breaking modules- so it's easier for companies to develop for Linux.

_Windows Drivers work the same way and nobody huffs and puffs about that_

I'd love to have an intelligent discussion on how one person's opinion on licensing issues stacks up against the legal teams of half the fortune 50's. Licensing doesn't work on "well, I didn't mean it THAT way."

[do_not_redeem]

I admit I'm not fully up to date on whether it's actually "license issues" or something else. I'm not a lawyer. As a layman here's what I know. I go to the Arch wiki (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ZFS) and I see this warning under the DKMS section (as you advised):

> Warning: Occasionally, the dkms package might not compile against the newest kernel packages in Arch. Using the linux-lts kernel may provide better compatibility with out-of-tree kernel modules, otherwise zfs-dkms-staging-gitAUR backports compatibility patches and fixes for the latest kernel package in Arch on top of the stable zfs branch

So... my system might fail to boot after updates. If I use linux-lts, it might break less often. Or I can use zfs-dkms-staging-git, and my system might break even less often... or more often, because it looks like that's installing kernel modules directly from the master branch of some repo.

As a practical matter I could care less if my system fails to boot because of "license issues" or some other reason, I just want the lawyers to sort their shit out so I don't have to risk my system becoming unbootable at some random inopportune time. Until then, I've never hit a btrfs bug, so I'm going to keep on using it for every new build.

[MrDrMcCoy]

I've been bitten by kernel module incompatibility making my data unavailable enough times that I no longer consider ZFS to be viable under Linux. Using an LTS kernel only delays the issue until the next release is LTS. I really hope that bcachefs goes stable soon.

[telgareith]

Its. Not. The. Lawyers.

[arp242]

I used ZFS with DKMS on CentOS back in the day, and I found it a pain. It took a long time to compile, and I had some issues with upgrades as well (it's been a few years, so I have forgotten what the exact issues were).

When it comes to filesystems, I very much appreciate the "it just works" experience – not having a working filesystem is not having a working system and it a pain to solve.

Again, all of this has been a while. Maybe it's better now and I'm not opposed to trying, but I consider "having to use DKMS" to be a downside of ZFS.