this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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Bcachefs Merged into the Linux 6.7 Kernel (www.phoronix.com)
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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https://www.phoronix.com/news/Bcachefs-Merged-Linux-6.7

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[–] stealthnerd 27 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (4 children)

I'm really excited for this. If it lives up to the hype I think it could become the defacto filesystem some day.

BTRFS, despite being a great filesystem, got a bad rep mostly due to its poor RAID5/6 implementation. It also lags behind in performance in many configurations and has been mostly relagated to a specialty filesystem. While it could make a great root filesystem few distros have adopted it as such.

ZFS has been similarly pigeon holed. It's typically only used for building large arrays because it's not very safe when used on a single device (edit: After some research this may not be true and is probably outdated or incorrect info stuck in my head) . It also lacks a lot of the flexibility of BTRFS, though you could say it trades flexibility for reliability.

bcachesfs on the other hand feels like it has the potential to be adopted as a root file system while also providing replication, erasure coding, high performance and snapshots; something that no filesystem has managed to date, at least on a wide scale.

[–] echo64 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

What makes you question zfs safety on single devices?

[–] stealthnerd 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Honestly this is probably me going off of outdated or even incorrect information. The fact that it has little adoption for that use case or as a root filesystem is probably the larger factor.

It's been awesome to see Ubuntu embrace it over the last few releases though and that's certainly starting to change things but since it's not part of the Linux kernel that gives most other distros pause I think.

[–] echo64 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

The lack of adoption is more about nervousness around who created it more than anything. It's incredibly stable and very well tested.

It's a shame because openzfs is really truely fantastic, so hoping this new thing keeps that momentum but for a wider audience.

But sad to see people like yourself suggest myths around zfs that don't have any basis, probably one of the other reasons it's less used, people think there must be some reason and things get made up along the way

[–] just_another_person 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

ZFS was pigeonholed? That's news to me. It's used on datacenter storage solutions everywhere.

[–] FlexibleToast 10 points 8 months ago

Pigeonholed on Linux because of the incompatible license. It can't be a part of the kernel. No technical reason it can't, only legal reasons it can't.

[–] stealthnerd 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I was referring to its lack of use as a root filesystem. It's primarily used for large storage arrays both at home and in data centers.

[–] just_another_person 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It's not a great choice for everyday use, that's why. It's a fine solution for scaled storage that makes it more performant on large disk arrays though.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Why though? I daily-drive it on multiple machines. The native encryption and ZFSBootMenu make it an awesome root fs. And incredibly easy to use with the way it handles mount points.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yeah. I only use it in Fedora because it was one of or the default partition scheme or the recommended one, can't remember. But I'm impressed with it, actually. Enough to make me try to learn the basics, in case I have to install another distro.

[–] FlexibleToast 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Fedora adopted it as default with Fedora 33. SUSE has been using it as default for many years now. Facebook is one of the largest users and contributors to btrfs. It's a solid filesystem when it's not used to do things it warns you not to do.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It's not that I don't trust it. I'm sure some years ago it was the base of some distro in my laptop. The thing is I'm more old school in terms of filesystems and partitions. I need to learn how to use it properly to enjoy its advantages.

[–] FlexibleToast 1 points 8 months ago

I was just adding context to the Fedora part of your statement. Honestly, Fedora has some work to do in order to really leverage it fully. When they fully integrate snapper, or something like it, then it will be actually using the benefits of btrfs imo.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Do you happen know if bchachefs's raid5/6 implementation is working/stable?

[–] stealthnerd 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I don't believe it's been marked stable yet but it doesn't suffer from the raid write hole like BTRFS and claims to be more performant than ZFS's implementation.

With it being merged into the kernel it should get much wider use and hopefully that helps it reach stability.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Thank you for the detailed reply!🤗

it doesn't suffer from the raid write hole like BTRFS

if so, then that's pretty awesome🎉

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago

I’m a happy btrfs user, but it’s most definitely a great thing to see what seems like a really clean implementation like this that is able to learn from the many years of collective experience with ZFS and btrfs.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Built-in encryption in bcachefs sounds great, that's the only thing that BTRFS has been missing for me so far.

Bonus points if it can be decrypted on boot like LUKS, and double bonus points if its scriptable like cryptsetup (retrieve key from hardware device, or network, or flash stick etc)

https://bcachefs.org/Encryption/

Will likely give bcachefs a spin as soon as it drops in Debian Unstable 😁

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Triple bonus points if it can do swap files on the encrypted filesystem.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Good. For one thing, we can move on to drama about something else. But, also, I'd like to play with it without having to build a kernel.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

I am on nixos and I can do exactly that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

I'm always nervous when hearing about new filesystems since a certain high profile news incident a several years back.

I really, really, really hope that Kent Overstreet has a really good relationship with any partner or spouse he may or may not have.