Bcachefs File-System Is Working On Going Upstream In The Linux Kernel

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Bcachefs File-System Is Working On Going Upstream In The Linux Kernel

Kent Overstreet who has been spending the past few years working on the Bcachefs file-system born out of the BCache block cache technology is now starting work on upstreaming the code to the mainline kernel...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Bcachefs-Linux-Upstream-Start

[darkbasic]

Wow, I really hope it gets mainlined soon.

[anarki2]

That's pretty darn sweet, but I still fail to see it gaining traction. RH pushes Stratis, SUSE pushes Btrfs, Ubuntu pushes ZFS. That's freedom of choice for ya.

[nazar-pc]

It looks amazing!
If it ends up been more reliable and/or faster than btrfs, I'll switch to it one mainlined and snapshots are added.

[EarthMind]

It would be interesting to see you including it in some FS benchmarks sometimes :-)

[kobblestown]

To me the killer feature of bcachefs are the two flavor of caching devices. Remind me a lot of ZFS's SLOG and L2ARC devices. I'm currently transitioning from btrfs in RAID1 to ZFS in RAIDZ and even though I gain extra capacity the major reason is the mature caching support in ZFS. But I'm going to miss BTRFS's flexibility.

[Grinch]

Nice! For my personal desktop use I've never really been interested in the likes of BTRFS or ZFS, as EXT4 fit my needs in terms of performance/features, but BCacheFS might be the one to change that. Does anyone know if Overstreet is working full time on BCacheFS these days ?

[geearf]

That's pretty darn sweet, but I still fail to see it gaining traction. RH pushes Stratis, SUSE pushes Btrfs, Ubuntu pushes ZFS. That's freedom of choice for ya.

Stratis is not a filesystem, and zfs will stay out of tree so that only leaves btrfs.
I think the codebase is much smaller than btrfs. and if it is better at what btrfs is not good at, that's a challenger rising right there.

Currently, we have:

• ext4, which works - mostly - but is showing its age. The codebase terrifies most filesystem developers who have had to work on it, and heavy users still run into terrifying performance and data corruption bugs with frightening regularity. The general opinion of filesystem developers is that it's a miracle it works as well as it does, and ext4's best feature is its fsck (which does indeed work miracles).
• xfs, which is reliable and robust but still fundamentally a classical design - it's designed around update in place, not copy on write (COW). As someone who's both read and written quite a bit of filesystem code, the xfs developers (and Dave Chinner in particular) routinely impress me with just how rigorous their code is - the quality of the xfs code is genuinely head and shoulders above any other upstream filesystem. Unfortunately, there is a long list of very desirable features that are not really possible in a non COW filesystem, and it is generally recognized that xfs will not be the vehicle for those features.
• btrfs, which was supposed to be Linux's next generation COW filesystem - Linux's answer to zfs. Unfortunately, too much code was written too quickly without focusing on getting the core design correct first, and now it has too many design mistakes baked into the on disk format and an enormous, messy codebase - bigger that xfs. It's taken far too long to stabilize as well - poisoning the well for future filesystems because too many people were burned on btrfs, repeatedly (e.g. Fedora's tried to switch to btrfs multiple times and had to switch at the last minute, and server vendors who years ago hoped to one day roll out btrfs are now quietly migrating to xfs instead).
• zfs, to which we all owe a debt for showing us what could be done in a COW filesystem, but is never going to be a first class citizen on Linux. Also, they made certain design compromises that I can't fault them for - but it's possible to better. (Primarily, zfs is block based, not extent based, whereas all other modern filesystems have been extent based for years: the reason they did this is that extents plus snapshots are really hard).

Does anyone know if Overstreet is working full time on BCacheFS these days ?

I believe he is.
He has a patreon for that.

[jwilliams]

Does anyone know if Overstreet is working full time on BCacheFS these days ?

I believe he is.
He has a patreon for that.

Which is currently providing only $1754 per month. So I doubt he considers that support for full-time work.

[ptyerman]

I had never even heard of this until this article. Now I'm also one that's looking forward to trying this, lets hope all goes well for going upstream.