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Bcachefs Submitted For Review - Next-Gen CoW File-System Aims For Mainline

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  • Bcachefs Submitted For Review - Next-Gen CoW File-System Aims For Mainline

    Phoronix: Bcachefs Submitted For Review - Next-Gen CoW File-System Aims For Mainline

    In development for over a half-decade already has been Bcachefs as a copy-on-write (CoW) file-system born originally out of the Linux kernel's block cache code. On Tuesday the Bcachefs patch series was sent out for review and hopeful inclusion into the kernel by lead developer Kent Overstreet...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    "The COW filesystem for Linux that won't eat your data". ... Directly following "...but also the known bugs are "too many to list."

    One of these two is NOT confidence inspiring!

    That said I have absolutely no experience with Bcachefs, but have been hearing about it here and there. Always fun to see new file systems join the huge pile of existing ones!

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    • #3
      I'm a longterm BTRFS user and have heard lots of people say that they're waiting for bcachefs. I'm excited to see how it will fair in practice after all this time.

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      • #4
        I don’t like unnecessary reimplementations of existing features, but I have to admire releasing something that’s so feature-complete. I hope it allows you to mark certain files to always be cached, because that’s something that seems to be missing from plain bcache and other caching solutions.

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        • #5
          Considering how long it took to gain some level of trust in BTRFS it can take quite some time till a new FS is going to be adopted widely.

          This leads to the question whether Bcachefs has a significantly better code base, by being less complex or by being blessed with very wise design decisions.. This would allow for an accelerated gain of trust

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          • #6
            bcachefs is at least tested by 3 people I know and one buisness, so far more reliable then btrfs among them. im super excited to try it myself, it's a shame dkms isn't availible for it.

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            • #7
              Have you actually read what was submitted? "Included in this patch series are all the non fs/bcachefs/ patches." This is not the bcachefs submission, this is just some preparatory work.

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              • #8
                Originally posted by Joe2021 View Post
                Considering how long it took to gain some level of trust in BTRFS it can take quite some time till a new FS is going to be adopted widely.

                This leads to the question whether Bcachefs has a significantly better code base, by being less complex or by being blessed with very wise design decisions.. This would allow for an accelerated gain of trust
                It was less about "gaining trust" so much as "destroying trust". BTRFS way over promised early on... specifically in a time period were RAID 5 was also a buzzword that everyone was jumping on... unfortunately this led to the discovery of a core design problem (that still exists today) in the RAID 5/6 implementation of BTRFS. This along with a number of early major bugs, ate a lot of peoples data when they thought it was supposed to be billed as a reliable FS.

                What it really came down to is really bad messaging and BTRFS trashed a lot of early trust... as it turns out gaining back trust in the FS space is incredibly hard.

                As long as Bcachefs is as transparent as possible on what is "experimental" vs usable vs reliable they should be able to dodge a lot of "loss of trust" issues.

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by zexelon View Post
                  "The COW filesystem for Linux that won't eat your data". ... Directly following "...but also the known bugs are "too many to list."

                  One of these two is NOT confidence inspiring!

                  That said I have absolutely no experience with Bcachefs, but have been hearing about it here and there. Always fun to see new file systems join the huge pile of existing ones!
                  Fair point. But the two aren't mutually exclusive. We'll have to see what "bugs" means. A hypothetical bug where the performance drops 10% when you have more than 12 CPUs isn't all that scary. Data corruption bugs are the worst news. This is a chicken and egg problem. Until we see more adoption, we may not see all the issues clearly. I know they've done a lot of testing.

                  I'm more than okay using BCacheFS for my Steam library, for example, which I wouldn't mind losing in the worst of cases. Seems like the ideal FS if you have a solid state disk backed by a huge hard disk, and you want the OS to dynamically manage your hot vs cold data. I've been using ZFS in this way to great success, but the fact that it's out of tree, and it's sometimes late in supporting the latest kernel can be a pain.

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by Joe2021 View Post
                    Considering how long it took to gain some level of trust in BTRFS it can take quite some time till a new FS is going to be adopted widely.

                    This leads to the question whether Bcachefs has a significantly better code base, by being less complex or by being blessed with very wise design decisions.. This would allow for an accelerated gain of trust
                    It's built on the Linux Kernel's block cache (bcache) V2, hence the name. IIRC this is what LVM2 and by extension, Stratis uses.

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