Call to Action
If you want this feature, upvote it and comment with:
- How much would you pay yearly for it
- Do you want 4 year or 5 year support
- If 5 year, how much are you willing to pay on top (this is a 33% higher engineering effort, roughly)
This could be a good in-between option for SMB (small and medium business, not the storage protocol): Still community support only, but a stable version that doesn’t need to be on a 6-month cadence. At a lower price than full-fat Enterprise.
Problem/Justification
The current unwritten CE EOL policy as per TTT 030 (Vibe Coding, MinIO Fork Fallout, and VMware Snapshot Shenanigans | TrueNAS Tech Talk (T3) E030) is that a dot two release deprecates the previous release. Deprecation means no more security fixes, with ixSystems reserving the right to be flexible about it. E.g. 25.04.2 would end security fixes for 24.10.2.2
This forces security-conscious CE users into a roughly 6 month upgrade cadence. Not all users may want that, particularly when major features change, such as virtualization changes in 25.04.
Impact
In this TTT, the idea of a paid-for LTS CE subscription is floated. Users would have the option to subscribe and receive N years of security fixes on the LTS version.
To make this engineering burden reasonable, a few things would need to happen:
- Enough users want this to pay for it and then some
- LTS is offered on a 2 year cadence, for 4 or 5 years. E.g. “every even-year dot 4 dot 2”. Similar to what Debian and Ubuntu do. It is not reasonable to make every 6-month release an LTS
- Why even-year: Debian does odd-year. This means a TrueNAS LTS is on a proven but not too-old Debian LTS. Alternative could be “every odd-year dot 10 dot 2”, which gets that Debian LTS a little sooner. The advantage of even-year dot 4 is that the Debian LTS can be combined with that year’s LTS kernel, if desired. The kernel goes LTS at the end of a calendar year.
- Using an LTS kernel would avoid needing to backport security fixes manually to “whatever kernel”.
- LTS kernels are only guaranteed support for two years. The kernel Debian ships with receives updates for five years by Debian. ixSystems builds their own kernel and will better understand the best way forward to make that component LTS supportable.
- A four year cadence is a considerably smaller engineering effort than five years: Two LTS at any time, rather than sometimes two and sometimes three. E.g. 26.04.2 would fall off with 30.04.2 on four year, but stay supported until 31.04.2 if it is five year.
- LTS to next-LTS updates are fully supported. This is an engineering lift to be sure. E.g. 26.04 to 28.04 to 30.04, without needing to go through 26.10, 27.04, 27.10, &c.
- Skipping an LTS update is not supported. 26.04 to 28.04 yes; 26.04 direct to 30.04 no.
- LTS means security fixes to the appliance. It does not mean backported features.
- Thought to be given whether bug fixes will be back ported and for how long. E.g. it may be reasonable to back port significant bug fixes for two years (until the next LTS), and only do security fixes after that.
- LTS might be restricted to the appliance itself. Supporting apps on a 5 year old version is a whole another can of worms, and I’d call that “best effort” - if they can still be updated great, but it’s not guaranteed.
- If bug fixes are back ported for 2 years then it’d be very friendly to make an effort to also support apps for 2 years
- This would allow users to always be on an LTS: Bug fix and “probably apps” support until the next LTS is out; security fixes after that. Users with storage only use cases may want to update every 4 years; users with more complex use cases that include apps may want to update every 2 years.
- “The time is right” - if ixSystems is to be believed, TrueNAS is rapidly becoming feature stable. Storage already is; apps hopefully are; virtualization I feel hopeful but unsure. 26.04 may be a good target for a first LTS.
- It’s mentioned above and I’ll mention it again for clarity: A user that upgrades every 4 years would need to do two updates in a row. Old-old-LTS to old-LTS to LTS.
User Story
User subscribes to LTS CE on the iX website, with a clear note as to which versions are currently LTS. User is warned that versions after the last LTS can’t take advantage. Ideally this is initiated from the TrueNAS UI so the system can check whether the user is currently on an LTS-supported version, and get them there if not.
User submits payment, pays for one year, and receives automatic renewal reminders one month before automatic renewal a year later. User receives some form of token.
User enters token into TrueNAS appliance and switches to “LTS CE” channel. If the current version is not an LTS, that is, previous check failed or user upgraded after, user is prompted to upgrade to an LTS if available; and otherwise prompted to try again when the next even-year dot 4 dot 2 has been released.