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Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't Proxmox use a separate kernel package compared to Debian? That's kinda annoying because it ends up making the distro a 'Frankendebian' at best. Even using an up-to-date kernel from the stable backports repositories is a lot better than that.

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They use a slightly modified Ubuntu kernel (https://github.com/proxmox/pve-kernel), with things like ZFS added. They also really are good about using proper Debian tooling, and so their kernel doesn’t cause any weird dependency issues.

Right now they install proxmox-kerne-6.8.12-6 by default (using pseudo-packages called proxmox-default-kernel and proxmox-kernel-6.8 pointing at it), and offer proxmox-kernel-6.11.0-2 as an opt-in package (by installing proxmox-kernel-6.11)

I’ve been using the latest opt-in kernels on all of my Proxmox nodes for a few years now, and I’ve never had any issues at all with that myself.

> things like ZFS added

That's a big gotcha - ZFS is non-free so of course it cannot be part of Debian proper. Hopefully we'll get feature parity via Btrfs or Bcachefs at some point in the future.

> ZFS is non-free so of course it cannot be part of Debian proper

ZFS is under the CDDL which is a perfectly good free and open-source software license, just some people view it as incompatible with GPL (IANAL, but this is apparently somewhat controversial; see the wikipedia page) so Debian doesn't distribute ZFS .ko files for Linux in binary form. They do, however, have an official package for it[1], just using DKMS to compile it locally.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Development_and_Distrib...

[1] https://packages.debian.org/sid/zfs-dkms

If some people see it as incompatible, its not perfectly good then, is it.

CDDL is a good license. GPLv2 is a good license. They happen to be (maybe) incompatible. That doesn't make either of them bad. I mean, would you argue that GPLv2 is bad because it's not compatible with CDDL?

I think that you can include it in cddl, but not the other way around.

Thats incorrect, it is free software but incompatible with the GPL.

It certainly has an optimized kernel for its use case. I believe it also includes ZFS by default. I wouldn't be surprised if the Proxmox developers would prefer to upstream these defaults, but they likely would introduce regressions for the common use case that Debian optimizes for.

Ultimately, I use Proxmox as a hardware hypervisor only, so I don't mind that it uses its own kernel. Everything I run is in its own VM, with its own kernel that is setup the way I want.

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