Bcachefs Merges New On-Disk Format Version For Linux 6.11, Working Toward Defrag

[Mitch]

And optimizing HDD spin layout so the game of the week and its mods were at the front of the drive

Good ole days my ass

I don't miss HDDs by any means, but I remember partitioning them so that music and other media would all go to the less-performant parts of the disks, while programs and games would go to the more-performant parts.

Also, I always tried to get the page file 2x my RAM and have it sit, defragmented, as close to the front of the drive as possible.

It was even better when you had TWO hard drives and could take advantage of the parallelism! (e.g. Windows + Apps on drive 1 as C:, Games + media on drive 2, partitioned as D: + E:, with Pagefile on both drives)

[reba]

For those that use btrfs and want something similar to the old defrag style graphics there is btrfs-heatmap.

What a coincidence! Just this morning I stumbled across btrfs-heatmap and thought how nice it would be to have it for other filesystems. It's so interesting how the filesystem is in use, how it fills, what can be cleaned up for that extra performance...

Then, again, I'm glad I really don't have to care for defragmemtation anymore at all.

Ah, past memories...

[hyperchaotic]

Ah yes, I remember how satisfying it was staring at this in the good old MSDOS days.

[avis]

That's one of my happy memories.

I'd run CCleaner to clear files, a registry cleaner called Registry Clean Expert, and then leave VoptXP running (a visual defragmenter) before heading to highschool or before bed. And when I got back, I'd get to see my squeaky-clean Windows XP, run a ram optimizer (can't recall which ones), and play Morrowind, Spellforce, Maplestory, and Gothic.

I had a screaming fast Pentium single-core CPU, a revolutionary Geforce FX 5500, and future-proof 1 GB of that sexy DDR2 RAM. And I squeezed more juice out of this monster with RivaTuner.

CCleaner - better do it manually if you know where to look.
Registry cleaners - all of them are snake oil and some actually manage to break Windows.
And I still use Vopt - probably the fastest defragmenter ever for Windows. I still have spinning rust where it's applicable.

[User29]

Ah yes, I remember how satisfying it was staring at this in the good old MSDOS days.

this always pleased my OCD

[NotMine999]

Aww... I was hoping we'd get a graphical defragger, even if just for kicks.

Ya want the GNOME 4 or KDE version of the GUI? Or maybe you'll want to wait for the spin that is coded in Qt6 ?

And there are development issues surrounding the Curses flavor of the GUI.

[NotMine999]

We need a Systemd-defragmentd:

"Checking your filesystem 1/10"
"Please don't turn off your computer…"

systemd-updated must be out there somewhere. I know that Windows 10 & 11 have been beta-testing it for years

"Windows Linux is updating your filesystem 1/10"
"Please don't turn off your computer…"

[voodoo20]

Great to hear about bcachefs improvements. I already using it with 2 SATA SSDs and 4 HDD. Did not manage to land root on it, and in fact at time of install bcachefs did not work from Arch install medium. So i added 2 smalls SSD (they spare anyway) and install just on ext4 with manual system backup, and on fresh kernel it (bcachefs) going like charm. Nothing serious, just home file server with some add services, with lot of files migrated from NTFS. On main PC still use btrfs, but eventually want try bcachefs.

[dfyt]

I tried bacachefs on root last week with cachyos. Not even a day later got corruption. The moment I opened steam the whole fs would go read only, was working fine minutes before kernel update. Fsck showed nothing. I tried to remove the .steam folder from a live iso and immediately the fs goes RO. This was 100% reproducible. I renamed . steam and tested all was well, but the moment I tried even an ls on that folder got RO.

I had a snapshot from the previous day and rsyncd that over, got errors in .lost and found which also put fs to RO. This reminds me of the btrfs issues I used to get about a year back. I think I took some screeshots. They often say "file has vanished...and the path" and error looking up inum.

Probably too late for a bug report, but I was pushed for time. Any ideas on how to approach it in future to assist in getting bcachefs more reliable?

Rsyncd to xfs + zfs and all is well but I want to try bcachefs when I have a gap again.

[jokeyrhyme]

I wonder if bcachefs defragmentation will have the same caveat that it does on btrfs: that it effectively unwinds Copy-on-Write and dereferences/duplicates data? On btrfs, at least, it's one of those gotchas that makes it completely unusable for a lot of use cases (e.g. when you have lots of snapshots, suddenly each snapshot will occupy lots of disk space instead of merely being mostly references)