Is iocage dead?

[Junicast]

Hi,

I was really happy when former FreeNAS switched to iocage as a jail manager. It was a little bit of work involved to migrate the old jails but I liked iocage so much that I also began to use it as a jail manager on stock FreeBSD servers.

Sadly there seems to be little to zero progress in development of that tool. There are hardly any responses to new issues in the github repo. There are no new commits either.
Since you guys here seem to be the most prominent party of iocage users I wanted to ask what ixsystems thinks about that. As iocage is a quite important part of TrueNAS because all the plugins are being realized with it. One could think you guys are tempted to just let all the BSD based solutions die and only support Linux in the future.

Thank you
Junicast

 

[sretalla]

One could think you guys are tempted to just let all the BSD based solutions die and only support Linux in the future.

A little searching on the forum would produce many mentions of the intent for the FreeBSD versions to continue into the future.

You can also see it in the official solution description video (and probably find it further documented on the iXsystems website):

TrueNAS Open Storage Overview

Interested in learning more? Speak with us today! https://www.truenas.com/business/ Data explosion is a problem that is faced everywhere. TrueNAS Open Storag...

www.youtube.com

 

[mistermanko]

I was under the impression iX is using their own iocage fork...

 

[Junicast]

I was under the impression iX is using their own iocage fork...

There is this repository but to me it seems equally inactive.

GitHub - truenas/iocage: A FreeBSD jail manager written in Python 3

A FreeBSD jail manager written in Python 3. Contribute to truenas/iocage development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

I don't get the idea of forking it. Will the patches go upstream as well?

 

[jgreco]

There is this repository but to me it seems equally inactive.

Inactive or feature complete? One of the things is that there's definitely software that doesn't see much in the way of updates once it is sufficiently mature.

I don't get the idea of forking it. Will the patches go upstream as well?

Well, the needs of an appliance OS like FreeNAS may be somewhat more specialized and unusual. It isn't that unusual for some local hacks to be needed.

 

[Kris Moore]

Just to clarify here. We (iX) originally spent a lot of cycles in the development of iocage to make it usable for FreeNAS (Now TrueNAS). At the moment we do not intend to do any further work on it beyond fixing high priority bugs that impact TrueNAS directly.

That said, I also am monitoring the iocage repo and see that it is mostly inactive these days. Speaking as the guy who wrote his own jail manager on FreeBSD back in the day, these things come and go. Just not a lot of incentive for most individuals or businesses to invest heavily in jail managers on FreeBSD anymore...