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Comment by stephen_g | Hacker News Reader

I’m interested to know what ‘full integration’ does look like, I use ZFS in Proxmox (Debian-based) and it’s really great and super solid, but I haven’t used ZFS in more vanilla Linux distros. Does Proxmox have things that regular Linux is missing out on, or are there shortcomings and things I just don’t realise about Proxmox?

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The difference is that the ZFS kernel module is included by default with Proxmox, whereas with e.g. Debian, you would need to install it manually.

And you can't follow the latest kernel before the ZFS module supports it.

Try CachyOS https://cachyos.org/ , you can even swap from an existing Arch installation:

https://wiki-dev.cachyos.org/sk/cachyos_repositories/how_to_...

There is a trick for this:

  * Step 1: Make friends with a ZFS developer.
  * Step 2: Guilt him into writing patches to add support as soon as a new kernel is released.
  * Step 3: Enjoy

Adding support for a new kernel release to ZFS is usually only a few hours of work. I have done it in the past more than a dozen times.

I use NixOS, and it simply updates to the latest kernel that supports zfs, with a single, declerative option.

for Debian that's not exactly a problem

Unless you’re using Debian backports, and they backport a new kernel a week before the zfs backport package update happens.

Happened to me more than once. I ended up manually changing the kernel version limitations the second time just to get me back online, but I don’t recall if that ended up hurting me in the long run or not.

You probably don’t realise how important encryption is.

It’s still not supported by Proxmox, yes, you can do it yourself somehow but you are alone then and miss features and people report problems with double or triple file system layers.

I do not understand how they have not encryption out of the box, this seems to be a problem.

I'm not sure about proxmox, but ZFS on Linux does have encryption.

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