Wendell has been talking about in the TrueNAS Scale beta video how IX Systems doesn’t want people messing in the underlying Debian especially for PCI Passthrough…
If that’s the case, why not make the root directory read-only like Steam Deck and SteamOS 3.0? Flatpaks to mess around with virtualization?
That’s likely the next step to idiot proof people that want to keep their arrays up and running. Just run it as a separate privileged user under a Flatpak. Unless it can’t do that…
My hunch is that they’re concerned about a GPL-violation by shipping pre-build ZFS modules.
The CDDL and the GPL are incompatible. Debian solves this with a zfs-dkms package that builds the modules on demand, the package doesn’t actually contain the modules because license.
I have no proof to back up this claim, it is just a hunch.
Actually, I think you’re pretty correct. A lot of the things like this result from licensing issues. If you’re going to include an entire Linux subsystem well, then your licensees need to be compatible and quite frankly the ZFS license is not compatible with any current distribution’s license.
Wow, that’s not an excuse not to let you play with the underlying Debian system that’s inside there. I can understand why they’ve done it.
If that is the reason, if it’s an asinine reason which definitely does happen a lot in the free software community then yes they deserve every bit of scorning outrage from Wendell and crew 
But how about we don’t give into speculation and somebody reach out to their team and ask what’s up with that? Surely they would be able to give some sort of response?
You also have to look at TrueNAS as a product, pretty much like a new car. If you start modifying your car your warranty is most likely going to go out the window at least until your restore the modifications you’ve done. That’s pretty much the same thing to TrueNAS, if you start modifying parts you’re compromising the integrity of the product and its no longer possible to provide support. This is very much why FreeBSD (for instance) doesn’t provide technical support for FreeNAS and I’m pretty sure that goes for Debian as well.
It seems like it is ok for Steam but only because we give Steam and their proprietary games a pass - we treat games as an artform to be appreciated and we permit their closed source nature because it is adjacent to copyright, which then feels ok to lock down.
Ix systems have no such luxury of locking things down because they are a software company and an open source one too. They could lock things down but the optics wont look good and pitchforks will come out and hurt their business.
You’re free to fork it but don’t expect any support from upstream. I’m pretty sure you’d have the same stance if you developed a product along with support that you wouldn’t give support and cover warranty if people started modding it left and right.
They’re understaffed. They don’t want to support it.
They don’t mind if you want to test it for them, but there are issues with pci passthrough and metadata corruption.
I don’t think that’s the correct way to put it, rather they’re not a consulting firm supporting Debian or FreeBSD as a whole rather a specific feature set.
That’s true.
I get the impression they have plans to incorporate more features in the future, once they’re done with performance tuning.
But the vision is a specific standard software package.
So it’s like a exFAT issue with licensing. Then does BTRFS even properly compare right now? Wendell is not sure about BTRFS, especially recovery from power loss.
No, it doesn’t by a longshot. It’s “usable” but not if you want to run RAID 5/6 and their counterparts in ZFS land.
That’s a real shame. So more drives would equal better performance? Would a 4 drive, 2 parity with 2 NVME SSD for metadata array have enough performance to run a VM?