Comment by brirec
15 days ago
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.
2 replies →
Thats incorrect, it is free software but incompatible with the GPL.