Bcachefs Fixes Pull Once Again Frustrates Linus Torvalds - Two Choices Offered

Linus Torvalds merged the newest round of fixes to the experimental Bcachefs file-system, but it's left Linux creator Linus Torvalds frustrated and he's presented two choices for the file-system moving forward due to the continued LKML drama.

A pull request was sent out today providing the latest round of various fixes to Bcachefs for Linux 6.12 following the merge window that ended last week. Linus Torvalds has since merged the code but he replied with:

"I'm getting really fed up here Kent.

These have commit times from last night. Which makes me wonder how much testing they got.

And before you start whining - again - about how you are fixing bugs, let me remind you about the build failures you had on big-endian machines because your patches had gotten ZERO testing outside your tree.

That was just last week, and I'm getting the strong feeling that absolutely nothing was learnt from the experience.

I have pulled this, but I searched for a couple of the commit messages on the lists, and found *nothing* (ok, I found your pull request, which obviously mentioned the first line of the commit messages).

I'm seriously thinking about just stopping pulling from you, because I simply don't see you improving on your model. If you want to have an experimental tree, you can damn well have one outside the mainline kernel. I've told you before, and nothing seems to really make you understand.

I was hoping and expecting that bcachefs being mainlined would actually help development. It has not. You're still basically the only developer, there's no real sign that that will change, and you seem to feel like sending me untested stuff that nobody else has ever seen the day before the next rc release is just fine.

You're a smart person. I feel like I've given you enough hints. Why don't you sit back and think about it, and let's make it clear: you have exactly two choices here:

(a) play better with others

(b) take your toy and go home

Those are the choices.

Linus

With "play better with others" an effort to enhance communication and collaboration with other Linux kernel developers/testers/etc. Or "take your toy and go home" effectively alluding to taking it out of the mainline Linux kernel and go back to developing it out-of-tree.

Kent argued that the recent commit dates are from polishing up the commit messages but that most of the fixes are about two weeks old. But then the discussion turned into more arguments over the state of the file-system and reportedly obtaining funding for the file-system recently. Torvalds then raised that the patches may be two weeks old but haven't appeared on any prominent mailing lists for review/testing/discussion.

Kent then challenged Linus Torvalds to come up with his own file-system:

"If you're so convinced you know best, I invite you to start writing your own filesystem. Go for it."

As of writing the latest response is from Linus Torvalds encouraging Kent to "WORK WITH OTHERS" and then ended with:

"I'm contemplating just removing bcachefs entirely from the mainline tree. Because you show again and again that you have no interest in trying to make mainline work.

You can do it out of mainline. You did it for a decade, and that didn't cause problems. I thought it would be better if it finally got mainlined, but by all your actions you seem to really want to just play in your own sandbox and not involve anybody else.

So if this is just your project and nobody else is expected to participate, and you don't care about the fact that you break the mainline build, why the hell did you want to be in the mainline tree in the first place?

Linus"

Those wanting to follow the latest Bcachefs mainline discussion can see this Linux kernel mailing list thread for all the discussion on where Bcachefs goes moving forward in relation to the mainline kernel.