Bcachefs Under Review With All Known Blockers Resolved

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Storage on 18 December 2020 at 12:03 AM EST. 43 Comments
LINUX STORAGE
Kent Overstreet who developed the Bcachefs file-system out of the Linux kernel's block cache code has sent out the latest patches for review and to also serve as a possible pull request for mainlining the code.

Overstreet began this week's patch series with "Since last posting: The main change for upstreaming is that I've added deadlock avoidance code for the page cache coherency lock, and moved all of that code into fs/bcachefs/ for now - besides adding faults_disabled_mapping to task struct. This addresses the last known blocker."

He went on to note that "everything is looking pretty solid" and there has been recent performance optimizations.

Known bugs remaining include possible kernel oopses with Zstd compression, erasure code being "not quite stable", an xfstests test case failing, and some timestamp bugs. But Overstreet noted, "Aside from that multiple devices, replication, compression, checksumming, encryption etc. should all be pretty solid - from polling my user base they say things have stabilized nicely over the past year."

The Bcache For Review series was submitted as a pull request. But at this point it doesn't look like it will necessarily happen for Linux 5.11... The merge window is nearly half over and Christmas week is just ahead. The only comments so far to the Bcachefs patches have noted x86-32 build problems and the lack of the patches being nicely broken up for easy review.

So for now we are continuing to monitor the situation to see when Bcachefs lands but at least given the progress over the past year gives us hope we'll see it mainlined in 2021 as another Linux file-system option.
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