Casefolding For Bcachefs File-System Posted

[WereCatf]

In BTRFS there is no an official JBOD disks arrangement. There are two profiles which may be used as JBOD:

Yes, I am fully aware, like I said in my comment.

[F.Ultra]

I think it is unfair to blame NTFS. The case insensitivity is at least as old as the original FAT filesystem in DOS era. Apple computers at that time also followed suit. ISO 9660 the first filesystem format for CD-ROM also followed that tradition. Nobody in Microsoft would let NTFS break the compatibility.

According to Wikipedia, there are older OSes/filesystems that are also case insensitive. Namely DECTape (and also Level-D, RT-11 etc) for PDP computers since 1964 and ODS-1 (and various -2, -5 etc) for PDP-11 and later on the VMS operating system since 1975. Bill Gates probably designed the FAT filesystem with them in mind.

Nowadays we take ASCII with uppercase and lowercase letters for granted but in the earliest days, the Morse code for telegraph is case insensitive.

FAT was designed and implemented by Marc McDonald, Microsofts first salaried employee.

[timofonic]

So much offtopic. Please talk about Bcachefs.

Sincerely, too much talk about BTRFS and NTFS.

I see a good indication that Valve employees are looking at Bcachefs!

[WereCatf]

So much offtopic. Please talk about Bcachefs.

Sincerely, too much talk about BTRFS and NTFS.

What is there to talk about? It's not in mainline kernel yet, so very few people have even gotten the chance to try it out. Also, it's just kind of redundant to keep stating over and over that it's good to have more modern filesystems to choose from.

Feel free to come up with something to talk about, instead of telling others to do it.

[mdedetrich]

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.

Given that rollbacks are an exeptional case, I think f2fs is by far the best fs for the steam deck usecase. Using less power/being more efficient is generally a bigger priority.

I have a hunch that there are 2 main reasons why steam deck didn't go with f2fs

• Stability/maturity
• f2fs has issues whereby adding/removing functionality (i.e. kernel args) can force you to reformat filesystem.

[renkin]

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 am not a fan of casefolding being implemented for filesystems in general. It is already a nightmare on Windows. Why bring it over to linux if we don't have to? IMO, (game) developers should always be using case-sensitive names.

[mdedetrich]

I am not a fan of casefolding being implemented for filesystems in general. It is already a nightmare on Windows. Why bring it over to linux if we don't have to? IMO, (game) developers should always be using case-sensitive names.

Because some games (which is Steam Deck's entire purpose) are built around casefolding working and a lot of these games are not going patched/re-released. Its not taking away from anything so I don't know what your problem is.

[oleid]

So much offtopic. Please talk about Bcachefs.

Sincerely, too much talk about BTRFS and NTFS.

I see a good indication that Valve employees are looking at Bcachefs!

Okay, especially for you I asked ChatGPT to tell me a joke about Linux filesystems, bcachefs included:

Why did btrfs, XFS, and ext attend the Linux party? They heard bcachefs was making a cache appearance, and they didn't want to miss the file action!

[renkin]

Because some games (which is Steam Deck's entire purpose) are built around casefolding working and a lot of these games are not going patched/re-released. Its not taking away from anything so I don't know what your problem is.

This only my opinion as someone who develops on Windows. We use Git on Windows, we use Jenkins on Windows, etc. Casefolding introduces a whole class of issues that would've been prevented automatically.

The games that rely on casefolding to not blow up are Windows games that also happen to run on Proton. I think, if anything, casefolding fixes should be placed in Proton rather than in the kernel.

[Archprogrammer]

But casefolding per directory enables you to limit it to where it's actually beneficial - you wouldn't set the casefolding flag anywhere else.