Just a minor hint: nix-store --gc is redundant as it’s already invoked by nix-collect-garbage.
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Thanks for explaining your setup. I have usually avoided LVM which IIRC used to be standard on many popular distros. Its inflexible volume sizing and thin provisioning implementation were never as good as ZFS which had true fluidity of volume size and proper COW/dedup. I had wanted to keep ZFS but now that it’s gone (I replaced it with one large ext4 volume) I think it will be awhile until I use it again on my laptop, just because I don’t have time to delve right now. I only have the one machine these days, a laptop that runs Linux. Things that require other OSs I do on other machines only occasionally. We do use open source KiCad for PCB design and firmware at work but currently closed source for mechanical, mostly for hiring reasons. I am familiar with loopback mounts and devices (losetup) plus their limitations and also agree with your political observations. After 20+ years I can also personally confirm your advice regarding investment in learning. I never take the path of least resistance, but am often forced to prioritize… I still take great joy in learning! Alas I must sleep: tomorrow I have some impressive factories to visit. Walter.
Hi,
well, zfs was a pioneer in storage, I call it instead of fs a dss, for
data storage system. And we desperately need something like that. The
sole real (and IMO better) competitor I know of is Hammer from
DragonflyBSD but unfortunately it run only on Dragonfly… It’s better
because it do substantially anything zfs do + is a logfs so you have
not only manual snapshot but also automatic one upon every write() so
you have good protection against accidental overwrite/deletion. On
GNU/Linux there is as far as I know only a project to create a poor
man’s zfs: stratis, essentially it wrap many tools to mimic a pooled
storage with (fake) auto-grow volumes like zfs. It’s in early stage
but being a wrapper it can be used on personal system without much
warning.
Personally I choose nilfs2 since it’s a log based fs on top of LVM and
while I miss zfs pool I can still live-resize (both grow and shrink)
my volumes in few step: for growing
- grow lvm lv in it’s vg
- grow nilfs2 (mounted and live, zero issue so far)
for shrinking - shrink nilfs2 (live) volume a bit more than target size
- shrink lvm lv at target size
- grow nilfs2 volume to match lv size
Nothing compared to zfs but far far lighter in system resource usage,
safe (nilfs2 is mainline Linux since years despite it’s slow growth)
and being a logfs I can recover any mistake quickly simply converting
last cp (automatic snapshot created at any write and autodeleted by a
garbage collector) to an ss (real snapshot mountable and kept as long
as I want) and mount it somewhere.
Linux in storage (and in networking) have a long road to evolve…
However, unfortunately big’s of IT do not want anymore innovative
systems so apart of GNU/Linux, at least for desktop and desktop hw
we have no real choices anymore and I fear that the future became
even worse: think of Windows WSL, Samsung DeX, Google Crostini, now
imaging a near future in witch OEMs sell only locked devices via
secureboot&c saying “oh, but you can install GNU/Linux! Go get it
from our store!” so they can sell de-facto closed platforms with
the benefit of community-made free software keeping their users in
a jail…
I hope OpenPower and European Processor Initiative (EPI) can go
somewhere also hoping from some state-backed move like Russian’s
Baikal/Elbrus/* and why not a Chinese one if it will exists to
broke x86 monopoly and just only to succeed shake a bit actual
sorry state of jail. Even not so small factories and project are
de facto slave of few big producer form basic hw needs in IT terms
to CNC machines, any tools needed to do something at a serious and
competitive level with a sort of oligopoly/monopoly it’s a disaster.
Anyway, good night and good work 
– Ingmar
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Hi,
Just a minor hint:
nix-store --gcis redundant as it’s already
invoked bynix-collect-garbage.
Thanks
changed in my config, I’m still learn and it’s a long path
– Ingmar
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@joko @dezgeg @grahamc (and anyone else in to ARM hardware) I visited Firefly’s office and met with their management today. They are very friendly and keen to develop distribution of their Rockchip-based ARM64 boards outside of China. For this purpose they said they are willing to send free hardware to open source developers in exchange for documenting and enhancing distribution-specific support for their boards. As far as I can tell, they use standard Rockchip u-boot, and I have had success flashing Android and Ubuntu images so far using the Rockchip Linux flash tool. If you would like to receive a board, please let me know your address via private message and I will pass your details along.
They also showed me a really cool 60-core fanless ARM64 cluster board (private development; not yet released)… might be a great future target for Nixops.
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