Kent developed for like 10 years on his own. He's just having a hard time learning how to play with others, and deal with large priority cycles. He just needs to know that sometime his changes will get pushed to the next cycle.
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2024
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This. Well said.
Kent is reasonable, and sees Linus's need to keep order. I think he just pushes it sometimes, and doesn't understand how problematic that can be.
That said - he has resubmitted an amended version of the patch, that doesn't touch code outside of bcachefs, and is less than 1/3 the size.
Can someone say why bcachefs is interesting? Btrfs I can sort of understand. I haven't much kept track of most others.
bcachefs is way more flexible than btrfs on multi-device filesystems. You can group storage devices together based on performance/capacity/whatever else, and then do funky things like assigning a group of SSDs as a write-through/write-back cache for a bigger array of HDDs. You can also configure a ton of properties for individual files or directories, including the cache+main storage group, amount of data replicas, compression type, and quite a bit more.
So you could have two files in the same folder, one of them stored compressed on an array of HDDs in RAID10 and the other one stored on a different array of HDDs uncompressed in RAID5 with a write-back SSD cache, and wouldn't have to fiddle around with multiple filesystems and bind mounts - everything can be configured by simply setting xattr values. You could even have a third file which is striped across both groups of HDDs without having to partition them up.
Thank you. w o w
two files in the same folder, one of them stored compressed on an array of HDDs in RAID10 and the other one stored on a different array [...]
Now that's what I call serious over-engineering.
Who in the world wants to use that?
And does that developer maybe have some spare time? /s
This is actually a feature that enterprise SAN solutions have had for a while, being able choose your level of redundancy & performance at a file level is extremely useful for minimising downtime and not replicating ephemeral data.
Most filesystem features are not for the average user who has their data replicated in a cloud service; they're for businesses where this flexibility saves a lot of money.
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Simple example: my Steam library could be RAID0 and unencrypted but my backups I definitely want to be RAID1 and compressed, and encrypted for security. The media library doesn't need encryption but maybe want it in RAID1 because ripping movies takes forever. I may also want to have the games on NVMe when I play them, and stored on the HDDs when I'm not playing them, and my VMs on the SATA SSD array as a performance middleground.
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This probably meets some extreme corporate usecase where they are serving millions of customers.
It's not that obscure - I had a use case a while back where I had multiple rocksdb instances running on the same machine and wanted each of them to store their WAL only on SSD storage with compression and have the main tables be stored uncompressed on an HDD array with write-through SSD cache (ideally using the same set of SSDs for cost). I eventually did it, but it required partitioning the SSDs in half, using one half for a bcache (not bcachefs) in front of the HDDs and then using the other half of the SSDs to create a compressed filesystem which I then created subdirectories on and bind mounted each into the corresponding rocksdb database.
Yes, it works, but it's also ugly as sin and the SSD allocation between the cache and the WAL storage is also fixed (I'd like to use as much space as possible for caching). This would be just a few simple commands using bcachefs, and would also be completely transparent once configured (no messing around with dozens of fstab entries or bind mounts).
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For me the reason was that I wanted encryption, raid1 and compression with a mainlined filesystem to my workstation. Btrfs doesn't have encryption, so you need to do it with luks to an mdadm raid, and build btrfs on top of that. Luks on mdadm raid is known to be slow, and in general not a great idea.
ZFS has raid levels, encryption and compression, but doesn't have fsck. So you better have an UPS for your workstation for electric outages. If you do not unmount a ZFS volume cleanly, there's a risk of data loss. ZFS also has a weird license, so you will never get it with mainline Linux kernel. And if you install the module separately, you're not able to update to the latest kernel before ZFS supports it.
Bcachefs has all of this. And it's supposed to be faster than ZFS and btrfs. In a few years it can really be the golden Linux filesystem recommended for everybody. I sure hope Kent gets some more help and stops picking fights with Linus before that.
ZFS doesn't have fsck because it already does the equivalent during import, reads and scrubs. Since it's CoW and transaction based, it can rollback to a good state after power loss. So not only does it automatically check and fix things, it's less likely to have a problem from power loss in the first place. I've used it on a home NAS for 10 years, survived many power outages without a UPS. Of course things can go terribly wrong and you end up with an unrecoverable dataset, and a UPS isn't a bad idea for any computer if you want reliability.
Totally agree about mainline kernel inclusion, just makes everything easier and ZFS will always be a weird add-on in Linux.
Btrfs doesn't have encryption, so you need to do it with luks to an mdadm raid, and build btrfs on top of that. Luks on mdadm raid is known to be slow, and in general not a great idea.
Why involve mdadm? You can use one btrfs filesystem on a pair of luks volumes with btrfs's "raid1" (or dup) profile. Both volumes can decrypt with the same key.
Bcachefs has all of this. And it’s supposed to be faster than ZFS and btrfs. In a few years it can really be the golden Linux filesystem recommended for everybody
ngl, the number of mainline Linux filesystems I've heard this about. ext2, ext3, btrfs, reiserfs, ...
tbh I don't even know why I should care. I understand all the features you mentioned and why they would be good, but i don't have them today, and I'm fine. Any problem extant in the current filesystems is a problem I've already solved, or I wouldn't be using Linux. Maybe someday, the filesystem will make new installations 10% better, but rn I don't care.
It's a filesystem that supports all of these features (and in combination):
- snapshotting
- error correction
- per-file or per-directory "transparently compress this"
- per-file of per-directory "transparently back this up"
If that is meaningless to you, that's fine, but it sure as hell looks good to me. You can just stick with ext3 - it's rock solid.
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bcachefs is meant to be more reliable than btrfs - which has had issues with since it was released (especially in the early days). Though bcachefs has yet to be proven at scale that it can beat btrfs at that.
Bcachefs also supports more features I believe - like encryption. No need for an extra layer below the filesystem to get the benefits of encryption. Much like compression that also happens on both btrfs and bcachefs.
Btrfs also has issues with certain raid configurations, I don't think it yet has support for raid 5/6 like setup and it has promised that for - um, well maybe a decade already? and I still have not heard any signs of it making any progress on that front. Though bcachefs also still has this on their wishlist - but I see more hope for them getting it before btrfs which seems to have given up on that feature.
Bcachefs also claims to have a cleaner codebase than btrfs.
Though bcachefs is still very new so we will see how true some of its claims will end up being. But if true it does seem like the more interesting filesystem overall.
Also because it's meant to be an enterprise level filesystem like ZFS, but without the licensing baggage. They share a lot of feature sets.
In addition to the comment on the mentioned better hardware flexibility, I've seen really interesting features like defining compression & deduplication in a granular way, even to the point of having a compression algo when you first write data, and then a different more expensive one when your computer is idle.
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Bruh, you can't just submit entirely new data structures as "fixes", let alone past the merge window.
It should not be hard at all to grasp that.
He accepted Linus's needs as the project head to keep order. He resubmitted the patch set without the contentious parts. It's less than 1/3 the size and doesn't touch code outside of bcachefs. Problem solved.
Honestly, Kent seems pretty reasonable (though impassioned), and bcachefs well probably make it, and Kent will get used to just submitting things at the right time in the cycle.
I was interested in bcachefs years ago, but Kent seems to keep shooting himself in the foot when it comes to getting any traction with it.
It's not as bad as it seems. He just doesn't know how valuable working with the provided structure is yet. A lot of innovative thinkers are used to questioning, bending, and tinkering with the rules. He's just still learning how necessary the existing structure is.
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I'm going to switch from BTRFS at some point, but at this point that's going to be a few years down the line.
Btrfs never really worked out for me (I think default COW doesn't play nice with VM images) and ext4 works great.
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I love kernel mailing list drama.
I definitely feel bcachefs is much more practical than zfs for home storage, I've used both. I don't use zfs unless it's TrueNAS because of the licensing issues, but bcachefs solves all of that and you can use different sized drives. I look forward to it being stable and glad it's working out. Luckily the only side affect is Linus' regretfulness. 😂
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Was considering bcachefs at some point but after seeing this, definitely a no for the foreseeable future. I don’t like surprises in my file systems.
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