This respository is to enable the use of Stratis on Debian-based GNU/Linux distros. I am currently working on using GitHub Actions to generate a release of stratisd and stratis-cli packages for Debian distros on the AMD64 architecture.

I prefer Debian. There’s ideological differences and tooling that I’m just more comfortable with…​but Stratis is an interesting thing and I think it should be available elsewhere. If any of this resonates with you, know that contributions are welcome.

Maintenance of this repository is best-effort. I make no garantees of accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose.

I’ve spent a lot of time (years now) with a misconception of what Stratis is and aims to achieve. Stratis might be for you if all of the following are true:

1. You need the scalability of ZFS

2. You need the performance capability of ZFS, but you don’t quite need the IOPs of Lustre and certainly don’t want or need that kind of infrastructre

3. You need the flexibility of Btrfs

4. You have a sound disaster recovery strategy that includes backups with long-term storage not on Stratis

5. You aren’t willing to wait for Btrfs developers to resolve the write hole problem

6. Bit rot may be a concern but it is not a high priority because of #4 or because data simply isn’t stored long term on your Stratis pool

At the time of writing all modern file systems in public use (APFS, Btrfs, ReFS, ZFS, Stratis, LVM2 + ?) are slightly better than awful. The fact we even made it this far is amazing. The reality is that storage is hard. Safe, performant storage is a gargantuan effort, and one of the most difficult problems for humanity to solve. Do not trust that your primary storage solution will always be trustworthy. Over a long enough time span, the probability of failure is 100%.

1. Clone this repository

2. run dependencies_debian.sh or manually work through each line to make sure it’s right

At this stage, you’ll need to troubleshoot what isn’t working.

There are some issues left to be resolved. The script to install dependencies and resolve build issues is a work in progress. The "script" currently provided lacks flow control, error check, dependency resolution and install validation. It is little more than a list of commands you might type in your terminal if trying to do this yourself, and you were in a hurry for a proof-of-concept.

1. After building and installing, reboot.

2. Start the stratisd.service daemon, and ensure it’s running. If so, enable.

3. Create a pool, eg sudo stratis pool create test-pool /dev/xvdb /dev/xvdc /dev/xvde