Bcachefs Rolling Out New Allocator, Performance Continues Improving

Bcachefs developer Kent Overstreet on Friday published a new status update on this original file-system born out of Linux's block cache (BCache) code. Bcachefs has been in development for years though it isn't quite yet in a position for landing in the mainline kernel. In any event a lot of feature work continues happening and Overstreet remains dedicated to the file-system's success.

This copy-on-write file-system has been in development since 2015 and now as we approach 2023, Kent Overstreet continues working on it as an alternative to the likes of Btrfs and OpenZFS. In Overstreet's Friday status update he didn't outline any new plans for getting Bcachefs mainlined but did note that the on-disk format changes have slowed down.

He's been fixing bugs in Bcachefs and addressing a range of feature work on this next-generation file-system. Some of the items covered in this most recent status update include:

- A completely rewritten allocator has been developed to address issues with the prior allocator. This new allocator is also much more scalable and simpler.

- Bcachefs snapshots support is now considered "largely stabilized". There still are some known bugs and "snapshot delete path still sucks", but it's getting into shape.

- The erasure coding (RAID 5/6) support is "getting close to usable".

- There continues to be a lot of performance work on Bcachefs. Bcachefs with 4K direct random write performance is now up by more than 50% compared to where it was just a few months ago.

See Kent's status update for the full coverage of all the Bcachefs happenings.