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by ggm 56 days ago
If this was built using zfs, it would have zvols and metadata in the fs for persistence. And the states would be perhaps more portable at a cost of .. zfs.

Not a huge criticism, life is about choices.

1 comments

Hello!

I went with Btrfs for persistence, and automated some things around that. For example, if you give Lightwhale two magic disks, it will automatically create a Btrfs RAID1. During persistence setup it will also create a few default subvolumes to fully support snapshots and rollback of the entire data filesystem. (Remember, the rootfs of the OS is still immutable, and is never part of the data filesystem). Besides snapshots and RAID, Btrfs has checksums which I think is a must.

I've heard lots of nice things about zfs, and I know it does snapshots and checksum too. But also that it eats huge amounts of memory for breakfast. I may not be updated on this, but I faintly remember some licensing issues, that potentially could cause problem if zfs was baked into an ISO like Lightwhale. Those are the main reasons why I'm reluctant to zfs and chose Btrfs.

But you're absolutely right, I have taken some radical choices with this dist. But most are deliberate and by design =)

Apple and Oracle had a fight. Mac took the low risk road. Debian are licence wary and so its add-ons.

The memory thing is somewhat misunderstood and tunable.

I'm not here to sell. You need confidence in the choices you make and you made rational choices.