For a short moment after it was added to the kernel, it seemed like there was a good chance of BcacheFS becoming an institution within the Linux ecosystem. A new filesystem with built-in multi-drive prioritized caching, replicas, encryption, subvolumes, the works. Anyone paying attention to the saga knows by now that this is not how things turned out, and with the release of Linux 6.18, BcacheFS was stripped out completely. BcacheFS still lives as an independently maintained project, an can be installed though the DKMS system, but this is a bit contrived even for my tastes.
While BcacheFS and Linux were still in the honeymoon phase in 2023, I decided to jump in with both feet. Today my main system runs a BcacheFS cluster composed of two 6TB hard disks and a 2TB NVMe. This created a >12TiB volume which transparently prioritizes the most frequently accessed files to the NVMe, while allowing me to set replication parameters on a per-directory basis. Aside from the nightmare of configuring the thing to boot, the experience has been stellar. Unfortunately, this is the end of the road. I’ll be switching back to a more “conventional” LVM-based setup. I don’t consider the potential situation where I need to compile out-of-tree kernel modules on a recovery USB to simply chroot into my system to be workable.
So today I will spend the day doing the whole hermet crab shell exchange with my files as I take the first drive from the cluster offline, reformat it, move files from the rest of the cluster to it, take another drive offline, etc. Wish me luck.
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Update: Apparently the
evacuatefunction is not working
Dare I ask why it didn’t turn out so well? It was one system I just never got around to looking at, I was busy being late to learning btrfs at the time.
The creator is unable to work with other people.
He also most likely ruined it for everyone else since now the Linux kernel maintainers are going to be less willing to sponsor up and coming projects.
Literally one of the worst human beings to be around.
Overstreet is uniquely terrible at understanding that the whole world doesn’t revolve around himself, but I wouldn’t lay the blame for this tendency entirely at his feet. Kernel development is chock full of egotistical personalities who treat their subsystems like personal feifs. People who would rather see innovative projects rot on the vines than make any architectural affordances. The demise of Rust in Linux is a good example.
Rust on Linux has left the experimental stage and is in the kernel proper but it was a bumpy ride. Hector Marcan (former asahi project leader) had to retire from the project because there were dipshits nacking their patches after multiple reviews. Not to mention the other rust for Linux person who resigned due to nontechnical nonsense.
Not to mention that abusive and inflammatory language was and still is tolerated in the mailing list. Tbh Overstreet just seems to be a product of the chud hacker culture that should be purged entirely.
I think a lot of this is downstream from Torvalds just being an unserious asshole, TBH. It is chud hacker culture, absolutely, but only because he fostered and promoted that kind of attitude in Linux development. Competent management could have done the opposite and it wouldn’t be nearly as bad.
BCacheFS looked kinda cool, I didn’t really look much into it, but was glad it made into the kernel, then the whole shitshow started with it lol and now I just kind of lost interest, still it would be cool to have a newer, better file system in the future. I have been using BTRFS for a while now and just the fact I can compress and deduplicate files is a blessing.
I never got into bcachefs because it was so much a bus factor of 1 project all reliant on Overstreet. Its so funny to see him lose his entire life’s work in the kernel by just intentionally pissing off everyone.
Pretty sure the guy is also a neo-nazi, it would be incredibly surprising if he wasn’t. No well adjusted person would act this way over a filesystem.
ReiserFS vibes
Overstreet murders btrfs devs, declaring their filesystem unfit for human consumption. Only bcachefs gives you the right amount of nutrients and carbs for a balanced diet.
What a pain. It sucks for everybody that it got taken out of the kernel. I wish it’ll be a different story in some years time, but I don’t have my hopes up.
I also had to drop bcachefs recently, which was really upsetting because it is a very cool filesystem. Unfortunately it now has the same issue as ZFS, it’s out of tree, it being in the mainline kernel was one of the biggest selling points for it since it clearly took inspiration from ZFS in a lot of areas and having a filesystem like that in the mainline was super cool. Oh well.
Godspeed, and may everything boot for you.
Best of luck. The LVM+LUKS+ext4 combo is rock solid. btrfs, bcachefs and zfs always seemed more risk than reward.
Btrfs has been great for me. Love being able to roll back to a previous snapshot if something gets messed up. I use it for my system drive and xfs for my user drives.
btrfs is good, just don’t use its raid5 or raid6. The tool even tells you not to, it’s experimental.
I don’t even use those with LVM. 1, 0, or 10, only.
At least 1 and 10 are stable with btrfs. I personally prefer to mirror for major storage so that rebuilds are simple and fast.
I’ve never been bitten by btrfs after using it for many years, but I think I will be going with XFS on LUKS on LVM (with caching) this time around.
I always confused xfs with zfs and write it off. I absolutely should migrate some of my big Raid10 volumes to xfs.
Btrfs + zstd compression + bees for dedupe is amazing. Reflinks are the main reason I am able to host a bajillion game servers without running out of space (along with ksm for memory dedupe but that’s another topic).
I’ve been conservative about switching to btrfs, but it’s been the default on Fedora for so long, and I’ve been using it on less critical computers without a problem for so long, that I finally switched my server to it when I upgraded my server hdd. Hope to take advantage of snapshot-based backups eventually.
Me too. I tried btrfs but I had problems that I couldn’t track down or resolve.
