TrueNAS Scale is debian based and it has zfs also. Which on another point TrueNAS dropped glusterfs support the day after Redhat dropped support, Redhat dropped btrfs years ago also, hence Enterprise users today consider it no longer supported. Using that logic, btrfs probably should never had gone into the Rose package in the first place. ZFS also has problems of it's own, zfs requires quite a bit of memory? They say 1GB for every 1TB, on top of the minimum, since the RDS has 32GB, you'll need every bit to run a large array, potentially placing a limit of around 20TB or so. I also wouldn't give up completely on zfs being introduced in the future, but the resource drain alone will be discouraging, especially with limited resources on other devices, you'd likely to be limited to the RDS or CHR/x86 platforms only which further highlights the issue as why would Mikrotik spend time on adding a niche option evnet though there would be a advantage. Has anyone considered the use of the containers to run a distribtued filesystem over the top? Cephfs and glusterfs for example can run in a ARM container, and being cross platform also. You'd run the filesystem for files with live replication, the VM hosts are snapshoted on their hosts system with the files copied off to the RDS for replication indeplendantly. On 24/10/2025 5:33 pm, Mike Everest via Public wrote:
Yeah, I think that the difference is that RouterOS is proprietary closed source and not like any of those other platforms. If they were to release a loadable module, they would need to release the source of the module which will probably disclose some of their proprietary work - which I guess is what they want to avoid.
Proxmox is Debian, I think, so all open source anyway, and TrueNAS is FreeBDS(?) so it's essentially the same as CDDL.
So RDS is stuck with alternatives until something else changes, or something new comes along ; )
Cheers!
-----Original Message----- From: James Hodgkinson <yaleman@ricetek.net> Sent: Friday, 24 October 2025 4:30 PM To: MikroTik Australia Public List <public@talk.mikrotik.com.au> Cc: Mike Everest <mike@duxtel.com> Subject: Re: [MT-AU Public] Re: ROSE DS Drive Hotspot?
It's a sad one, since Ubuntu / Debian / TrueNAS and others are distributing it as a kernel module and have for years...
In 2016 Ubuntu announced that a legal review resulted in the conclusion that it is legally acceptable to use ZFS as binary kernel module in Linux. (As opposed to building it into the kernel image itself.) On 2025-10-24 12:59 Mike Everest via Public wrote: OK!
Thanks Crag, Thanks Andrew - good to know.
I still don't like the chances that ZFS will ever come - the licensing issue is a significant deal-breaker for RouterOS.
Maybe proxmox solution is one of those that are open to legal challenge, which is one way to approach it - holding out hope that 'our lawyers are better than yours' (and 'we can afford to pay them for longer' ; ) - or maybe they have negotiated some kind of license exception. Either way, it is not likely that we'll see it (though not impossible! : )
What is far more likely, is that there will be additional FS support that address the deficiencies (real and perceived) of currently supported filesystems - such as those mentioned (thank you!) Which is why I asked (so that they know : )
Cheers!
-----Original Message----- From: Craig Askings via Public <public@talk.mikrotik.com.au> Sent: Friday, 24 October 2025 1:16 PM To: MikroTik Australia Public List <public@talk.mikrotik.com.au> Cc: Craig Askings <craig@askings.com.au> Subject: [MT-AU Public] Re: ROSE DS Drive Hotspot?
Andrew,
That was a better answer than I would have given.
The killer feature for me is how lightweight snapshotting is and the ability to ship snapshots between servers.
Makes offsite point in time replication a breeze.
You get into the habit of making snapshots all the time.
Updating your DB schema? Snapshot! Distribution upgrade? Snapshot! YOLOing that Netbox upgrade? Snapshot! Bulk deleting files by hand? Snapshot! Etc.
On 24 Oct 2025, at 10:54 am, Andrew Radke via Public <public@talk.mikrotik.com.au> wrote: Hi Mike,
Craig and others can probably answer this more eloquently than me but ZFS has a number of major advantages: Absolute data integrity. Data corruption is almost non-existent. For it to occur all mirrors or slices need to fail. And it knows whether any piece of data is good or not so you aren’t left guessing. People are often more worried about cosmic rays and using ECC RAM than about ZFS or the disks. Utter reliability. BTRFS is still a long way off comparatively. Yes BTRFS is good from everything I’ve seen but it’s just not at the same level. 99.99999% is not good enough for critical storage. Snapshots. BTRFS has them too (and other filesystems) but ZFS’s snapshot speed, size, functionality, etc and the ability to send and receive them all over the place (across different OSs even) is game changing. I even use them as backups sent to removable disks. Standardised and stable. We use Proxmox for our clusters. I can send ZFS snapshots and backups to anything else with ZFS. I can send them across Proxmox versions and clusters and to FreeBSD systems. Tools. They are a little esoteric to learn but consistent and very functional. Speed and performance is also amazing. Basically you just don’t think about it anymore. Adding a ZIL and L2ARC on fast flash storage in front of spinning rust is really quite incredible with what it achieves. And the memory based ARC is a piece of black magic. Instantly resizable zvols acting as block devices (or quotas on datasets) makes VM maintenance a modern miracle. Did I mention data integrity and reliability? I’ve lost data once in 20 years of ZFS use and that was because it was on a system with a single NVMe and I screwed up. Of course ZFS told me it had a problem and what was lost. It meant I had to re-provision a few VMs but the system never held “data” in any case as they were DNS secondaries and the like. So having said all of this, I can also say I don’t know BTRFS. I’ve looked at it multiple times over the years but it has never been close to ZFS on the data integrity. And at the end of the day that’s what storage is for. I’ve also looked at Ceph many times, and it looks to be quite similar to ZFS in it’s data integrity concepts but from what I can see it’s performance is awful in comparison no matter how much network you throw at it. Of course if that doesn’t matter too much it looks absolutely incredible. Lastly, with regards to the licensing, Proxmox has worked out how to make it work and they are no longer some small little company that is ignored by the various communities and legal people. I’d hope Mikrotik could do the same. They probably have a lot less incentive, since it would mean working it out for what is at the moment just one product. But if they could, I’d buy a RDS in a heartbeat. Until then, I’ll keep stuffing storage into my Proxmox servers. Cheers, Andrew
On 24 Oct 2025, at 9:51 am, Mike Everest via Public <public@talk.mikrotik.com.au> wrote: :-D
Would you believe I never even noticed that – I read it from the beginning as ‘hot swap’… weird how that works…! By the way, what is the big deal with ZFS anyway, and why is it actually so important/necessary? I’m not being captious, but genuinely don't understand the ins and outs in this context and would like to continue applying some 'encouraging pressure' on MT to add it in future :-}
Cheers!
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From: Steve Sugden <steve@valvenetworks.com.au> Sent: Friday, 24 October 2025 10:30 AM To: MikroTik Australia Public List <public@talk.mikrotik.com.au> Cc: Mike Everest <mike@duxtel.com> Subject: Re: [MT-AU Public] Re: ROSE DS Drive Hotspot?
Thanks everyone!
Also realised my typo in subject as Hotspot instead of Hotswap!
Regards,
Steve
On Fri, 24 Oct 2025 at 09:07, Mike Everest via Public <public@talk.mikrotik.com.au <mailto:public@talk.mikrotik.com.au> > wrote: G'day!
Unfortunately not :-l
And unlikely to ever be, apparently, due to "license incompatibility" of ZFS license terms: ZFS is CDDL, Linux kernel (hence RouterOS) is GPL. What it means is that when ZFS is compiled into any license kernel project, then the resulting distro becomes also CDDL. Arguably, ZFS could be released as an independent routerOS module, but the jury is out as to whether that is a technically valid work-around, and even so, it would no longer be part of the main kernel code so potentially some loss of performance(?) which kind of defeats the purpose of using that filesystem anyhow? Cheers! ------------------------------------------------------------------ --- --------------- Why Choose DuxTel for all your MikroTik needs? 10 good reasons: http://duxtel.com/why_duxtel ------------------------------------------------------------------ --- --------------- Follow our tweets for news and updates: http://twitter.com/duxtel
> -----Original Message----- > From: Craig Askings via Public <public@talk.mikrotik.com.au > <mailto:public@talk.mikrotik.com.au> > > Sent: Thursday, 23 October 2025 5:52 PM > To: MikroTik Australia Public List <public@talk.mikrotik.com.au > <mailto:public@talk.mikrotik.com.au> > > Cc: Craig Askings <craig@askings.com.au > <mailto:craig@askings.com.au> > > Subject: [MT-AU Public] Re: ROSE DS Drive Hotspot? > > Is ZFS supported? > >> On 23 Oct 2025, at 3:35 pm, Darren Clissold via Public > <public@talk.mikrotik.com.au <mailto:public@talk.mikrotik.com.au> wrote: >> Hi All, >> >> We also provided some feedback to Mikrotik and were informed >> that XFS > support may soon be added for rose-storage. >> Regards, >> Darren >> >>>> On 23/10/2025 2:55 pm, Steve Sugden via Public wrote: >>>> Hi All, >>>> >>>> Does anyone know or have experience with ROSE DS and if the >>>> drives can be hot swappable? >>>> >>>> >>>> Regards >>>> >>>> >>>> -- >>>> >>>> Steve Sugden >>>> *Director* >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> *Valve Networks Pty Ltd*ABN: 31 168 442 288 ACMA Carrier Licence: >>>> 447 >>>> Office: Level 3, Space Building, 328 Scottsdale Drive, Robina, >>>> QLD, >>>> 4226 >>>> Phone: 1300 458 136 | Mobile 0413 440 479 >>>> Email: steve@valvenetworks.com.au >>>> <mailto:steve@valvenetworks.com.au> | Web: >>>> www.valvenetworks.com.au <http://www.valvenetworks.com.au> >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> Public mailing list -- public@talk.mikrotik.com.au >>>> <mailto:public@talk.mikrotik.com.au> To unsubscribe send an >>>> email to public-leave@talk.mikrotik.com.au >>>> <mailto:public-leave@talk.mikrotik.com.au> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Public mailing list -- public@talk.mikrotik.com.au >>> <mailto:public@talk.mikrotik.com.au> To unsubscribe send an >>> email to public-leave@talk.mikrotik.com.au >>> <mailto:public-leave@talk.mikrotik.com.au> > _______________________________________________ > Public mailing list -- public@talk.mikrotik.com.au > <mailto:public@talk.mikrotik.com.au> To unsubscribe send an > email to public-leave@talk.mikrotik.com.au > <mailto:public-leave@talk.mikrotik.com.au> _______________________________________________ Public mailing list -- public@talk.mikrotik.com.au <mailto:public@talk.mikrotik.com.au> To unsubscribe send an email to public-leave@talk.mikrotik.com.au <mailto:public-leave@talk.mikrotik.com.au>
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