On 5/17/24 17:07, Kent Borg wrote:
I think I'm going to try something I don't think I have done before: a major Linux version OS upgrade, performed in place. Debian 11 -> 12, in my case. This is just my laptop, no services anyone else cares about.

Looks like I was successful! At minimum I have some emacs futzing to do (I opened a Rust source file and that integration is complaining about something), and I'll discover other problems, but at first glance it seems a success.


And it is official: I don't like ZFS.

I had previously played with it on this machine, so there were various ZFS binaries installed…and they were the /only/ thing that caused problems:

       *** ZFS Version: zfs-2.0.3-9+deb11u1
       *** Compatible Kernels: 3.10 - 5.10
I looked back on my notes for things I had installed that included the letters "zfs" in their names and I removed them and apt quit complaining.

I'm sure it's my fault, that I could have installed some completely different version of ZFS and this ancient project had some good reason for such discontinuities. Or my original ZFS installation had problems that prompted me to do something stupid as a workaround and I was tripping over that.

Anyway, XFS didn't fail on me (nor make it my fault). And my old ext2 boot volume didn't fail, either. Only ZFS tried to stop me from upgrading! Good thing I wasn't using it.

Oh, and back when I was playing with ZFS on my laptop I also played with ZFS on a Raspberry Pi 4*. Guess what? When I started repeating what had worked on my laptop, one of the key ZFS utilities crashed on the Pi 4. I'm guessing ZFS's reputation for having ugly sources is related to all of this.

File systems should work, before being clever and having cool features their primary requirement is to /work/.


Anyway, bravo Debian. The 11 -> 12 upgrade worked.


-kb


* That Raspberry Pi 4? It is my current e-mail server, I finally finished setting it up a couple weeks ago when I double checked my work, held my nose, and cut over. Well, a several step cut over to make reverting easier if needed, but still a cut over. I'm now running SW raid 1, XFS, on two spinning disks (yes, I needed a powered USB hub for that). Oh, and I did need a custom compiled kernel, but I am booting and running off that disk pair; I am /not/ booting off of an SD card, I don't trust them. No fans—the PI 4 is the sweet spot at the moment, the PI 5 pretty much requires a CPU fan.
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