I was going to avoid this release for longer and even had the update blocked in my Pi-Hole. But its a long weekend and there are no fireworks in Baltimore. So it seemed like a good time to play with it. I took the blocks off my Pi-Hole, removed incompatible packages and installed DSM 7. And was quite surprised.
I have numerous shell configurations for nginx, reverse-proxies for various web-sites, scripted auto updates for a multitude of lets-encrypt certificates, and other custom configurations. Often, these get wrecked and need to be setup again after a major DSM update. But that was not the case this time. Everything is working. Including Channels-DVR. I have docker on here, but haven't been running it on the NAS recently. I prefer leaving Docker apps to run on my Pi to keep load down on the Synology. So I'm glad the native Channels install still works.
It should be said that users should never need to reinstall the Channels DVR package. All the actual application updates are done through the app itself, not through package manager.
Anyway, I notice a performance improvement running Channels on my Synology with DSM 7. Just tested watching 3 OTA channels, while recording 5 different OTA channels (these were all high-bitrate OTA HD), while running comskip. + Also recording from 3 HD cameras in Surveillance Station.
Load averages remained lower than I have seen before with this kind of load. IO wait didn't spike like it usually does with 5 recordings and comskip.
This may be unique to my circumstance, as I am running btrfs on RAID 6. And the DSM 7 changelog does specifically list both btrfs and RAID 6 improvements with IO speeds. But I thought I should mention it anyway. I originally said this DSM should be forever avoided. But, after testing for a day, I have changed my mind. This release seems to increase the capability of my DVR.
I am sure that I will still eventually find some custom thing that needs re-configuration after the upgrade. But thats ok, it was worth it in my case due to the disk performance improvements that it added.