On Sat, May 09, 2026 at 08:04:13AM +0200, Paul Gevers wrote: > Yes, but the next standard kernel was incoming. Can't this package be ready > ahead of time?
Yes, that would be ideal but it seems a bit unreasonable to expect debian's ZFS packaging team to be capable of time travel. Mostly zfs-dkms works fine, but occasionally a kernel update is released which breaks compatibility with ZFS and other out-of-tree modules. They have no control over when an incompatible new kernel is released, or when that kernel is packaged for debian, or when the upstream ZFS project patches ZFS to work with the new kernel (and this is not helped by the fact that some of the linux kernel devs are hostile to zfs and tag it as "proprietary" even though it's open source). They can only react to these events AFTER they happen. This is not just a packaging issue. Significant changes have been made to the kernel which break compatibility with ZFS, so significant changes have to be made to ZFS to make it compatible again. This takes time to code and to test. And nobody thinks this is ideal, it's been an ongoing problem for almost 2 decades and everyone involved is sick and tired of it but it's probably never going to change, it's just a PITA you have to be resigned to. The only real solution is for Oracle to re-release ZFS under the BSD (**NOT** GPL) license, which is extremely unlikely to ever happen (read as "never"). And then the OpenZFS devs would have to do the same with their derivative which they forked long ago. And then it could go in the mainline kernel. But none of this will ever happen. Which leaves us with pragmatic solutions like "Don't upgrade your kernel until you're sure it's compatible with any modules you need". craig PS: one thing I forgot to mention in my "guide" in Step 3 was that you need to upgrade zfs-dkms **before** upgrading the kernel. Kind of obvious, but sometimes it's best to state the obvious to avoid confusion. Also, I wrote "Even when a new zfs-dkms module is **installed** [...]" when I meant "Even when a new zfs-dkms module is **released**". PPS: yes, the CDDL does kind of suck and it is incompatible with the GPL. But a) that incompatibility only hinders *distribution* of combined binaries, not what end-users do on their own systems (hence the existence of zfs-dkms) and b) it IS open source, not proprietary. Most ex-Sun people involved with writing the CDDL claim that incompatibilty with the GPL was not a deliberate goal, but I find that impossible to believe - the incompatibliity was obvious, and they weren't clueless enough not to have seen it (and people were pointing it out and loudly complaining that it had the same problems as the MPL), and Linux was seen by Sun Microsystems as an existential threat at the time (and, rightly so - Linux **did** eat their lunch). If ZFS weren't so good, nobody would care by now. It would just be another piece of software doomed to irrelevancy, nothing more than a historical curiosity.
