Bcachefs Linux File-System Sent Out For Review With Exciting Feature Progress

[pal666]

If I would be Redhat/IBM, I'd throw a couple of millions and make sure Kent has a nice to team to work with

well, if you were redhat/imb, you wouldn't have millions to throw, only smart people could have millions

[Awesomeness]

when fedora defaulted to xfs

Fedora never switched from XFS to btrfs.

Fedora Workstation 33 switched from Ext4 to btrfs.
Fedora Server 22 switched from Ext4 to XFS and is still using XFS.

[pal666]

If they can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen

it looks like you can't stand the heat of btrfs

[pal666]

Fedora Workstation 33 switched from Ext4 to btrfs.
Fedora Server 22 switched from Ext4 to XFS and is still using XFS.

ok, let's rephrase it "defaulted to ext4 or xfs"

[pal666]

Maybe not a decision point, but certainly it is a factor in that it changes the picture and puts an end to the "BTRFS is not ready/unreliable/etc" idea.

well, fedora switch is certainly good for btrfs. but how is it bad for bcachefs? now what? all bcachefs devs suddenly switch to btrfs?

That means there will probably be less people interested in developing yet another CoW filesystem

less than one?

fund it etc

people funding scams will not be affected by your reasoning

There is also the simple fact that people hate reformatting

then they'll stay on ext4 anyway. oh, i get your point, you can in-place convert ext4 to btrfs. at least i did that in the past

[pal666]

We're excited because btrfs will never get RAID done well

maybe you could also share future stock prices from your crystal ball? btw, how sane person could be excited by promised replacement which has even slower development pace?

[jacob]

well, fedora switch is certainly good for btrfs. but how is it bad for bcachefs? now what? all bcachefs devs suddenly switch to btrfs?
less than one?
people funding scams will not be affected by your reasoning
then they'll stay on ext4 anyway. oh, i get your point, you can in-place convert ext4 to btrfs. at least i did that in the past

Bcachefs devs won't switch to btrfs. But there may (*may*, I have no cristal ball) be much less new people willing to join bcachefs development or fund it. There was an incentive when many people felt that Linux needed something other than btrfs; if they feel that btrfs is available and working right now, the point kind of becomes moot.

The in-place conversion from ext4 to btrfs is terrible by the way, I tried it once and it's more a proof-of-concept or a publicity stunt than anything else. For good btrfs performance you need to reformat. Of course, some people who use ext4 may stay with it virtually indefinitely, some may decide to take the jump if they believe a new filesystem gives them features that are worth the hassle. But again: to an ext4 user, btrfs brings big-ticket features that can justify bothering with it. What would justify the effort of migrating from btrfs to bcachefs?

[stiiixy]

I asked this before a couple years ago, and got a constructive reponse, so time to ask again;

With ANY filesystem, do you need to reformat in order to gain new feature?

My use cases; I could really use some of the new XFS feature's for my media storage, but currently don't have the fund's for more massive storage drives to 'fiddle'. Can I simply update the kernel? Or, my second use case being an older BTRFS array, simply do a scrub (or whatever the integrity checker is called) to get newer/improved feature's?

[pal666]

What would justify the effort of migrating from btrfs to bcachefs?

nothing would justify migrating to inferior fs, just like nothing would justify funding some empty claims. but some people do it nevertheless. regarding your first point, it don't think fedora default by itself means "now you have to reformat your ext4". but it means that indeed more polish will get into btrfs, its rate of improvement will accelerate and in closer future people will be more likely to reformat ext4

[pal666]

With ANY filesystem, do you need to reformat in order to gain new feature?

sometimes. it depends on fs and feature. but with btrfs things like changing raid levels don't need reformat and it's easy to reformat on the fly(you can easily change it's size, i.e. you could free some space, create new fs there, move some data to it, shrink old fs, grow new, repeat