Bcachefs Merges Support For Btrfs-Like Snapshots

[Chugworth]

Yes, you said it yourself "certain situations". Outside of what distributions typically support natively within the installer and associated tooling - Ext3/4, XFS etc, adoption is quite low for any of what you listed as a general purpose filesystem.

The ZFS license issue should be so easy to work around. It doesn't have to be built into the kernel. The distros should include the ZFS module like Ubuntu does, and give the option of using it as the root filesystem. Ubuntu is doing it backwards though by giving the option for the desktop install but not the server install. I use both Btrfs and ZFS and they each have their place. Btrfs is great for single drive scenarios and ZFS is great for multi drive scenarios. In order for ZFS to perform well it needs to do a lot of caching, so I don't think that it would be ideal for a desktop computer unless it has lots of memory to spare.

[timofonic]

ZFS, Btrfs, XFS, even EXT4...

I hope Bcachefs someday manages to replace and outperform all them.

[atmartens]

My home file server uses a combination of Bcache, LUKS, XFS and mergerfs, with SnapRAID for asynchronous redundancy/parity. A single SSD provides read and writeback block cache for 10 HDDs, and SnapRAID will snapshot parity for those 10 disks onto 2 parity disks every 6 hours. The upside of this setup over conventional (including ZFS) raid is that most HDDs will be spun down most of the time, meaning they are silent, use little power and generate little heat. Thanks to Bcache, they don't even spin up for ls or find most of the time, because the metadata blocks are on the SSD most of the time. Another upside is that I can mix HDD sizes and make full use of all of them, given that the parity disks are at least as large as the largest data disk. For read-mostly file systems that are mainly used for archival, it's a perfect compromise! I have a separate SSD-only filesystem for highly volatile data.

You should publish a guide.

[flower]

People usually go "I used btrfs, got disappointed and now I'm happy with the enterpriZe-grade™ zfs" or the other way around, what made you disappointed in both of them?

just after three months it was so fragmented that it could only read with 30mb/s from my 6x4TB raidz2 array. i only had 5400rpm drives at that point (which seems to be a proplem)

i dont like that it is not possible to extend raidz - this is about to change. but afaik extending doesnt lead to a better layout.

atm i use integritysetup (checksums on ssd) - mdadm - cryptsetup - lvm - ext4. which works really great and without any performance issues.
but it lacks comfort. i have to make custom initramfs hooks and it takes a long time to initialize a new drive

[brucethemoose]

Looks like Bcachefs might become my root in another year. I'm wanting a replacement for BTRFS and it's currently a competition between Bcachefs and F2FS.

So how many of y'all write F@FS the first time instead of F2FS?

Thats quite a change, isn't it? BTRFS is a high overhead, "everything and the kitchen sink" type FS, while f2fs and (probably) bcachefs are low overhead, more barebones type fs.


That being said, 5.15 f2fs has given me pretty much everything I would want from a simple flash FS.

[flower]

(probably) bcachefs are low overhead, more barebones type fs.

bcachefs has raid (1/10/5/6), checksumming, supports ssd cache (write / read), encryption, snapshots, compression, dynamic removing and adding of disks at runtime

all of those features are marked stable (considierung its small user base take this with a grain of salt).
i wouldnt call that low overhead.

[trapexit]

You should publish a guide.

It's mostly straight forward as mergerfs doesn't care about the underlying filesystem (within reason.) So it's just setting up bcache as normal across multiple hdds and using mergerfs as normal. I did create a prototype tool to do similar with dmcache but never finished it. Useful in that it allows arbitrary caches over existing devices. The pain is orchestrating the setup at startup.

[waxhead]

Oh, I love btrfs: https://unix.stackexchange.com/quest...how-to-recover

Can you find an example that does not layer BTRFS on top of any other layer?!

[You-]

I truly don't get the ZFS license issue...

It's not like oracle has ever sued anyone over licencing...

[mdedetrich]

It's not like oracle has ever sued anyone over licencing...

Completely irrelevant with respect to ZFS, just like with solaris and libreoffice the open source community has forked these libraries/applications and they are now managed by open source community without license issues pertaining to Oracle.

The issue with ZFS is that it's license is incompatible with GPL 2, it has nothing to do with Oracle potentially suing ZFS.