@joka-fx That’s good news on the bios raid install front. I was a little surprised when it happened to me, hence the find. Anaconda is definitely getting better though but yes there is also an occasional python error message on otherwise completely normal installs. A little disconcerting but still it does afford us quite a bit of flexibility.
Re disconnecting drives etc I would caution you that btrfs is still in heavy development on that and a few other fronts (speed of raid 5/6 rebalances etc) and doesn’t yet have a concept of a bad disk so we obviously can’t yet put such things into Rockstor. But upon them appearing there is every intention of doing what we can to make things easier. As is it will be necessary to drop to command line to effect special mounts etc in disaster recovery scenarios, just a heads up.
Memory / swap wise I would say you are golden there. But some say there can still be issues with no swap at all but I think this relates to older kernels. Let us know how this goes as there is another thread/exploration on alternative install arrangements by @Spectre694 that may benefit from no swap - “Install to full disk BTRFS” to simplify things.
On the bonding interface, no this is not at the moment supported so Rockstor just doesn’t know what’s going on if it’s setup in the installer. There is a forum thread “Support bonded networking” however and an open issue “Support bonded networking”. Bit of a mismatch but Rockstor does it’s own network config so we can have such things as dedicated management interfaces etc so can’t really inherit in the same way as a generic CentOS from the installer. Best, as you have found, to stick to as few changes in the installer as possible really. Not as neat as we would like but we gain a great deal from inheriting it. Maybe in the future it could be customized beyond kickstart config and branding but at the moment I don’t think this is a priority.
Thanks again for the reporting and testing, it definitely helps to surface the things of interest and highlight weak points.
I expect others will chip in here with more comments as this is some nice equipment. I’m not sure of the reliance on hardware raid myself but then given my previous comments maybe this could act as a stop gap until btrfs gets it hot spare and dead drive patches merged.
Don’t know of a time frame but it’s definitely under consideration and now has it’s own issue “Support backup to USB devices” and a couple of forum threads have brought it up: “[Where Rockstor could improve…] (Where Rockstor could improve compared to other NAS solutions?)” and this one. There has been some progress towards this in the background however, ie drive roles and improved smart custom options.
Do keep the forum posted on your progress and findings.