Casefolding For Bcachefs File-System Posted

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Casefolding For Bcachefs File-System Posted

The Bcachefs file-system continues to work its way toward the mainline kernel while interestingly this weekend a Valve developer posted patches for implementing case-folding (case insensitive) feature support for this open-source file-system...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Bcachefs-Case-Folding-Patches

[avis]

I am not a fan of casefolding being implemented separately for each individual FS instead of being tackled at the VFS layer.

Considering the implementations it doesn't seem possible to do everything at the VFS layer but at least some pieces should be common between FS'es.

And it's nice to see seemingly the first actual patch for Bcachefs not coming from its original developer, Kent Overstreet. Looks like Bcachefs is interesting to other people as well.

[Eberhardt]

I am not a fan of casefolding being implemented separately for each individual FS instead of being tackled at the VFS layer.

Considering the implementations it doesn't seem possible to do everything at the VFS layer but at least some pieces should be common between FS'es.

The patch is actually quite small and uses the unicode casefolding functions from the linux/unicode.h header, so technically a lot of code is already shared.

[Snaipersky]

I am not a fan of casefolding being implemented separately for each individual FS instead of being tackled at the VFS layer.

Considering the implementations it doesn't seem possible to do everything at the VFS layer but at least some pieces should be common between FS'es.

And it's nice to see seemingly the first actual patch for Bcachefs not coming from its original developer, Kent Overstreet. Looks like Bcachefs is interesting to other people as well.

I believe Valve is looking for a more advanced fs than ext4, without the reliability questions of BTRFS. Reflinks would greatly assist proton, cutting down on the redundant prefix files, and case folding at the fs level is much faster than the wine layer implementation, which becomes especially noticable when something like modorganizer is involved. Plus snapshots/COW would eliminate the space and complexity of the current A/B situation, which would be especially beneficial on the 64GB steam deck.

[Britoid]

I believe Valve is looking for a more advanced fs than ext4, without the reliability questions of BTRFS. Reflinks would greatly assist proton, cutting down on the redundant prefix files, and case folding at the fs level is much faster than the wine layer implementation, which becomes especially noticable when something like modorganizer is involved. Plus snapshots/COW would eliminate the space and complexity of the current A/B situation, which would be especially beneficial on the 64GB steam deck.

There's not any reliability problems with btrfs outside of raid 5/6, iirc the steam desk uses btrfs for the root fs but ext4 for the game data partition.

Some games however, don't run on XFS/btrfs and want an ext4 fs. It's also not the fastest FS right now

[Awesomeness]

I believe Valve is looking for a more advanced fs than ext4

And I think that just because someone does contract work for Valve, this doesn't mean that Valve as a whole is in any way involved.

[MadWatch]

Some games however, don't run on XFS/btrfs and want an ext4 fs.

Why is that?

[ireri]

There's not any reliability problems with btrfs outside of raid 5/6…

That is not true, at least Debian has a list of btrfs problems compiled, with only a portion related to raid. There are other not universal problems that affect certain use cases, like (but not limited to) deduplication and metadata loss with some =<v5.x kernels.

Edit:added an = sign I missed.

[brucethemoose]

I believe Valve is looking for a more advanced fs than ext4, without the reliability questions of BTRFS. Reflinks would greatly assist proton, cutting down on the redundant prefix files, and case folding at the fs level is much faster than the wine layer implementation, which becomes especially noticable when something like modorganizer is involved. Plus snapshots/COW would eliminate the space and complexity of the current A/B situation, which would be especially beneficial on the 64GB steam deck.

I think its less about reliability and more about performance. Compared to ext4, btrfs (with cow) has overhead and is quite cpu heavy, which matters more in a handheld were every milliwatt consumed is a milliwatt the GPU can't use, and which uses relatively slow SD card flash.

... Also, btrfs does not have casefolding.

I think Valve would have switched to f2fs if they were really thinking about a near term ext4 alternative, but maybe they are looking at bcachefs for the next Deck iteration. Lz4 compression and easy system rollbacks would be very useful, and f2fs doesn't have either.

[Spajdrex]

Joshua is on fire!