Bcachefs Working Towards Online Fsck, Faster Mount Times

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Bcachefs Working Towards Online Fsck, Faster Mount Times

In the works now for over three years has been BCachefs that doesn't receive nearly as much attention as Btrfs, Stratis, ZFS On Linux, or other next-gen Linux storage options, but it does continue making progress and still possesses a lot of potential...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Bcachefs-2018-December

[anarki2]

Bcachefs is possibly the only sane candidate for a next-gen FS. Too bad all the big companies are placing their bets on others, like the bloated and eternally-in-beta Btrfs, which is already deprecated by RH. Or ZFS, which is useless on the desktop. Or Stratis, which is just a wrapper around existing tools, playing catch-up, and won't offer anything actually useful for years.

Unless some big corp get behind this project, it's doomed to not gain any momentum. This guy needs money to earn a full-time salary so that he can dedicate all his time to it. He also needs some help to speed things up, but then he also needs some good recruiters to vet the incompetent candidates, because otherwise it will be Btrfs again lol.

I wish him all the best. Linux really needs a proper and capable filesystem at last.

[geearf]

Bcachefs is possibly the only sane candidate for a next-gen FS. Too bad all the big companies are placing their bets on others, like the bloated and eternally-in-beta Btrfs, which is already deprecated by RH. Or ZFS, which is useless on the desktop. Or Stratis, which is just a wrapper around existing tools, playing catch-up, and won't offer anything actually useful for years.

Unless some big corp get behind this project, it's doomed to not gain any momentum. This guy needs money to earn a full-time salary so that he can dedicate all his time to it. He also needs some help to speed things up, but then he also needs some good recruiters to vet the incompetent candidates, because otherwise it will be Btrfs again lol.

I wish him all the best. Linux really needs a proper and capable filesystem at last.

Apart from sponsoring him, I'm concerned about how long he'll keep maintaining the FS once he's landed it.
He pretty much doesn't support bcache anymore, will it be the same with bcachefs?
(I believe Namesys did the same thing with Reiserfs when they started Reiser4).

[waxhead]

Alright... so let's do a quick compare between bcachefs (according to it's webpage) and BTRFS which is the only real competition.

Feature	BcacheFS	BTRFS
Data checksum	Nope (not used, but implemented)	Yup
Metadata checksum	??? (not used???, but implemented)	Yup
Replication	Nope	RAID0, RAID1, RAID10, RAID5, RAID6, DUPLICATION (*RAID5/6 is not recommended)
Compression	Nope	ZLIB, LZO, ZSTD
Encryption	Yup (but stated unreliable)	Nope
Quotas	Nope	Yup (but not recommended)
References:	https://bcachefs.org/	https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Status
	https://bcachefs.org/Todo/

I may be biased towards btrfs since I am both a fan of it and use it daily for many machines (without a single problem just for the record).
I try to be unbisased , and have based this on just what is CLAIMED to be working from the references. While I have nothing against bcachefs at all it is not really there yet (or the website is outdated) as far as I am able to understand.

Now I hope bcachefs does get there, but so far there is not many useful things working it seems.
Replication is there, but it not taken advantage of which means it is useless in it's current form, which makes scrubbing and auto-repair impossible and therefore useless compared to btrfs where this has been working quite well at least since kernel 4.4.

[geearf]

Alright... so let's do a quick compare between bcachefs (according to it's webpage) and BTRFS which is the only real competition.

Feature	BcacheFS	BTRFS
Data checksum	Nope (not used, but implemented)	Yup
Metadata checksum	??? (not used???, but implemented)	Yup
Replication	Nope	RAID0, RAID1, RAID10, RAID5, RAID6, DUPLICATION (*RAID5/6 is not recommended)
Compression	Nope	ZLIB, LZO, ZSTD
Encryption	Yup (but stated unreliable)	Nope
Quotas	Nope	Yup (but not recommended)
References:	https://bcachefs.org/	https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Status
	https://bcachefs.org/Todo/

I may be biased towards btrfs since I am both a fan of it and use it daily for many machines (without a single problem just for the record).
I try to be unbisased , and have based this on just what is CLAIMED to be working from the references. While I have nothing against bcachefs at all it is not really there yet (or the website is outdated) as far as I am able to understand.

Now I hope bcachefs does get there, but so far there is not many useful things working it seems.
Replication is there, but it not taken advantage of which means it is useless in it's current form, which makes scrubbing and auto-repair impossible and therefore useless compared to btrfs where this has been working quite well at least since kernel 4.4.

I believe the website to be highly outdated, patreon has more current information.

[Dr.N0]

You can already support him: https://www.patreon.com/bcachefs.

[jacob]

I believe the website to be highly outdated, patreon has more current information.

Interesting. But if the website is highly outdated, that's not the sign of a well-ran project. My impression was that BcacheFS started with all the easy stuff while BTRFS tacked all the hardest problems first. Apart from a profound dislike towards ZFS I don't have any personal stake in the filesystem wars and if BcacheFS turns out well, we will all be better off for it. But judging by Overstreet's past grandiose claims, based on a very simple implementation that didn't do anything of what makes BTRFS or ZFS so useful, I remain sceptical. If he manages to steer through the devilishly complex problems that need to be solved in order to implement a full-featured replacement for BTRFS and ZFS and still achieve his claims, then it would be a great achievement, but I'm not holding my breath.

[skeevy420]

Bcachefs is possibly the only sane candidate for a next-gen FS. Too bad all the big companies are placing their bets on others, like the bloated and eternally-in-beta Btrfs, which is already deprecated by RH. Or ZFS, which is useless on the desktop. Or Stratis, which is just a wrapper around existing tools, playing catch-up, and won't offer anything actually useful for years.

I've been using ZFS as root for my Antergos desktop for 3 years now with ZFS as my go-to for random drives before that. Untuned or not implemented correctly, ZFS sucks regardless of where it's being used; I consider that statement true for all file systems.

ZFS only sucks on the desktop because there aren't any good graphical tools (gparted-esque & time machine like tools), snapshots aren't implemented in update utilities, GRUB doesn't support the newest features for /boot on a zpool, other bootloader solutions aren't that great, and the ram requirements aren't geared towards desktops (assloads of registered ECC ram aren't common on desktops).

ZFS has most of the bits and pieces in place that most of us want, it just has a high degree of difficulty to use and higher than usual requirements (especially for things like deduplication) compared to damn near every other file system. Once you get used to it and its features, it's hard to go back.

I'm just saying that I wouldn't call it useless on the desktop. Being able to snapshot before a pacman -Syu, a full blown emerge system rebuild, an Ubuntu dist-upgrade, doing some editing under /etc, or before doing whatever system breaking activity is great...especially when your desktop doubles as your work\home business PC. My last bad Windows update had me down for days until I reinstalled Windows (should have just reinstalled but I tried to fix it first). My last bad Antergos update had me down for minutes while I added /snapshot/ to my root pool's location (I always leave at least one kernel untouched during an update just for that...one that should boot both the updated system and the snapshot since I don't have a method to snapshot Grub and then boot into the snapshotted Grub...knows how, just too lazy to implement).

[AndyChow]

I am extremely excited about BcacheFS. The design is just good. btrfs is badly, badly designed. Nothing will fix a bad initial design. Yes, ZFS is great, but does not allow array shrink, or devices of different sizes, so it's rather inconvenient.

[profoundWHALE]

Alright... so let's do a quick compare between bcachefs (according to it's webpage) and BTRFS which is the only real competition.

Feature	BcacheFS	BTRFS
Data Safety	Hasn't eaten my data (yet)	Ate my data

First, ZFS and XFS are competitors:

XFS is extremely fast and stable but has developed about as far as it can go... it's hard to add features without breaking underlying design.
ZFS is extremely safe and stable but the speeds suffer greatly in return for the data safety features. The features currently added are insane and they work really well... but the license is problematic for widespread adoption. Also configuration isn't as user friendly or flexible.
BTRFS is extremely fast and has a lot of cool features... but it widely inconsistent and is slower than ext4 (the fastest one) and unstable compared to ZFS.

Second, in those regards, I think Bcachefs will be faster than ZFS, have cooler features than XFS, won't eat your data like BTRFS, and be flexible to configure.

I remember when BTRFS just came out and it was a joke. I'm using Bcachefs on my daily machine and it hasn't had nearly the same issues that BTRFS had around it's age.