18 votes

Bcachefs: The next-gen filesystem for Linux that aims to fill the shortcomings of BTRFS and ZFS

Posted by Fantastitech
Tags: linux, filesystems, btrfs, zfs
https://www.patreon.com/bcachefs/overview

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Title
Kent Overstreet is creating bcachefs - a next generation Linux filesystem | Patreon
Word count
1620 words

4 comments

  1. [2]
    jgb
    Link
    Interesting project - and I agree with the author's assertion that this is a niche in need of filling. Filesystems are in that weird category of software along with encrypted messaging services...

    Interesting project - and I agree with the author's assertion that this is a niche in need of filling. Filesystems are in that weird category of software along with encrypted messaging services where just one or two bugs can sink the software's reputation - and I think BTRFS has been pretty conclusively sunk.

    3 votes
    1. Fantastitech
      Link Parent
      I adopted BTRFS a few years ago and for the most part it's been pretty solid. But where it wasn't solid it was very bad. I've recovered from about a half dozen drive failures with no detectable...

      I adopted BTRFS a few years ago and for the most part it's been pretty solid. But where it wasn't solid it was very bad. I've recovered from about a half dozen drive failures with no detectable data loss, but the first time it happened there was a very glaring slab memory leak that caused OOM errors every few hours of the recovery process. Kernel panics aren't something you want when trying to recover a RAID array. There's still no reliable utility for checking used and free space on parity RAID. The documentation wiki is constantly out of date. The only point of contact is an extremely busy mailing list. Every kernel version seems to be a critical upgrade because of important BTRFS patches. It's just a mess.

      I went with BTRFS over ZFS mainly because of the flexibility. bcachefs will have all my boxes checked for requirements as soon as snapshotting is implemented and I'm going to start moving over non-critical stuff to it.

      2 votes
  2. [2]
    tyil
    Link
    This looks very interesting. I've always been more of a fan of ZFS over BTRFS, but ZFS is more maintainance on GNU+Linux since it's not available in the kernel by default. I don't see bcachefs...

    This looks very interesting. I've always been more of a fan of ZFS over BTRFS, but ZFS is more maintainance on GNU+Linux since it's not available in the kernel by default. I don't see bcachefs available in the Portage repos though, so I can't try it out yet. Would be very interesting to see it in action.

    1 vote
    1. Fantastitech
      Link Parent
      Kent is working on getting it into ML right now. I haven't tried on Gentoo, but it compiles perfectly well against Ubuntu and Debian make configs. I imagine Gentoo would be even easier. Kernel:...

      Kent is working on getting it into ML right now. I haven't tried on Gentoo, but it compiles perfectly well against Ubuntu and Debian make configs. I imagine Gentoo would be even easier.

      Kernel: https://evilpiepirate.org/git/bcachefs.git
      Userland: https://evilpiepirate.org/git/bcachefs-tools.git