When to upgrade to Dragonfish?

TrueNAS General
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1

I generally wait until the *.1 release of a TrueNAS version to upgrade in order to wait for the few bugs in the new release to be ironed out, but I am wondering whether I should do this with the impending 28/5 release of Dragonfish 24.04.1 or instead to wait until the *.2 release.

My concern is the significant number of forum posts which describe people having problems after upgrading. I know that a number of these are related to the Linux memory management clashing with the ZFS ARC memory management, and that this issue already has a workaround and will absolutely be fixed in 24.04.1 - however there are many other reports of issues with disks not being found, with various services no longer working etc.

Of course, people post then they have issues, and not when they have a successful upgrade, but I am left with uncertainty about how reliable 24.4.0 has been and whether I should go with 24.4.1 or wait for 24.04.2.

Does anyone have any advice for me (and anyone else who has similar concerns)?

2

My only Problems with Dragonfish have been the already mentiond memory problems and somewhat higher cpu usage and higher spikes in cpu temps. With Cobia my idle temp was around 40°C with occasional spikes to around 50°C, with dragonfish my idle temp is 44°C with frequent spikes to 67°C.

Edit:

Otherwise my system is just as stable as it was with cobia.

3

I’ve been running Dragonfish since release, and apart from the MGLRU issue you mentioned it’s been as stable as Cobia for me.

The only issues that I’ve run into personally are the following:

  • MGLRU causing uneccessary swappage
  • After a long period of time Netdata will prompt for a username and password that we do not have (fixed in 24.04.1)
  • Application stats (network traffic) are completely incorrect (fixed in 24.04.1)

Something of note is that from 24.04.1 swap will be disabled by default, so if you want to re-enable it you’ll need to add swapon -a as a post-init task.

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4

I’m running into what seems to be a pretty unusual issue with 24.04, that being that it takes ~20 minutes to import all my pools. Since the boot process only allows 15 minutes for that, it finishes booting without having my apps pool online, resulting in k3s not starting and thus my apps not running. It doesn’t sound like this is going to be fixed in .1. I may try it anyway just in case, but I’ll probably be waiting for .2.

5

I assume that there was a sound reason for this decision. Can anyone tell me what it was?

Also, if Swap is disabled by default is the default swap size for new disks also set to 0?

6

Reasons here:

Swap space will still be allocated for .1, but in 24.10 it will be set to 0.

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7

I have 16GB of swap space allocated for Bluefin and Cobia, but it only ever uses 512GB, so I will probably leave swap turned off when I eventually upgrade to Dragonfin and reclaim the swap SSD space for other use.

8

I just did a “sudo swapoff -a” and (as expected) swap went from 0.69GB to zero, and cache went from 4.45GB to 3.95GB (almost as expected).

I will report back as to whether this has a noticeable impact on the ARC hit ratio once I have had enough usage to tell.

9

Thanks to @everyone for the feedback so far. I appreciate all the fixes and good works that ixSystems have put into 24.04.1 to correct the biggest issues, but I am still unclear what issues remain and whether it will be stable enough for me to upgrade or whether I should wait for 24.04.2…

10

I’d say if you feel like upgrading wait until a few days after it’s release and get a general consensus, I’ll be upgrading as it comes out so I’ll be sure to scream and shout if anything goes awry.