Linus Torvalds Marks Bcachefs as Now 'Externally Maintained' (phoronix.com)
- Reference: 0178933332
- News link: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/25/08/29/2033242/linus-torvalds-marks-bcachefs-as-now-externally-maintained
- Source link: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Bcachefs-Externally-Maintained
"The Bcachefs code is still present in the mainline Linux kernel likely to prevent users from having any immediate fall-out in Bcachefs file-systems they may already be using, but it doesn't look like Linus Torvalds will be honoring any new Bcachefs pull requests in the near future," adds Phoronix's Michael Larabel.
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Bcachefs-Externally-Maintained
[2] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=ebf2bfec412ad293a0b118fb1a20a551088ebc9b
Looks like new filesystems have a tendency... (Score:3)
... to require so many changes in different parts of the kernel that those are hard to justify and agree upon for only the benefit of that particular new filesystem. Reminds me of the long struggle to get "reiser4" into the kernel, which ultimately never happened, and that was not just because its name got an awkward connotation.
Re: (Score:2)
The ironic thing is that we need new filesystems. btrfs has had some changes, but it really needs the fscrypt mods mainlined, and if we can get Synology to push their "Lock & Roll" stuff to mainline, it will go a long way for immutability. Btrfs still has concerns on the write hole front, and it desperately needs an encryption layer built in for performance reasons, because FDE is a must these days... and no, LUKS doesn't cure everything.
What we REALLY need is a filesystem like VMFS. A checksumming,
Re: (Score:3)
> ... to require so many changes in different parts of the kernel that those are hard to justify and agree upon for only the benefit of that particular new filesystem. Reminds me of the long struggle to get "reiser4" into the kernel, which ultimately never happened, and that was not just because its name got an awkward connotation.
I guess the integration effort was murder.
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I'm not a kernel developer by any stretch of the imagination, but I was tinkering with an extension that would allow Linux file systems to support file-level versioning. In order to implement it, I would have had to make significant changes that would likely break current functionality.
There are many different file systems out there today to accommodate many different use cases. However, the really innovative stuff is much harder to implement without breaking existing functionality. I can't help but w
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah it turns out that filesystems are complicated. Like really really complicated.
Umm, From June? (Score:2)
"In June 2025, Linus Torvalds announced bcachefs would be ejected from the kernel as a result of repeated violations of kernel development guidelines.
[1]Wikipedia on bcachrefs [wikipedia.org]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcachefs
Sad (Score:3)
was the most promising Linux filesystem. To be able to use a SSD as a cache for hard drive (RAID) array is a very useful use case. And block-level caching will never be as optimal as filesystem-level caching. De-fragmenting the filesystem shouldn't invalid the cache.
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You can use zfs, just that you need to install it separately. I use zfs on a lot of stuff, but have not tired bcachefs, as it is still "experimental" IIRC, so I do not know what it offers better than zfs.
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Yeah, I meant it that I need to install it, it does not come built into the kernel like ext4 or xfs.
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ZFS is awesome. However, in the RHEL universe, it isn't supported. Yes, it will work, but when dealing with production, what works and is supported by the vendor are two different things. Even though Fedora has btrfs, Red Hat Linux doesn't have a single checksumming FS as a supported option. The only way to do that is to use a stack of block utilities, like dm-integrity, md-raid, and such to add that onto the lower layers, then throw XFS or ext4 on top.
Having bcachefs would have been a nice alternative,
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bcachefs uses a license which allows it to be officially integrated into the kernel, it could have become a better alternative to btrfs in many things it already is!
Re: Sad (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, less sad and more better than expected. Given the behavior of the bcache maintainer/creator, i fully expected it to be torn out entirely. It's experimental after all, so removing it was totally on the table.
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I heard FAT12 had it beat for raw performance.
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Agreed. I see this as happy news. At least Overstreet has a chance to continue development, make improvements, drum up PR, get some enthusiastic users or distros that are willing to apply patches, and eventually prove the filesystem has enough merit to gain adoption. Unfortunately this change probably limits his ability to get funding, so I'm not optimistic. At least Overstreet is merely hard to work with, unlike the eponymous author of ReiserFS and Reiser4.
Re:Sad (Score:4, Interesting)
Just use the bcache kernel module...that is the caching code that is under bcachefs. Bcache works with any filesystem that you want to do read/write caching for. Bcache is actively maintained by a group of people at this point, instead of just under 1 person for bcachefs, which makes becoming dependent upon bcachefs very dangerous.
There is also zfs, which is also a great option.
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At that point, we might as well use LVM2's caching, as an option.
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This reply smells of someone that has never used both.
bcache by itself is rather inefficient. That's why bcachefs was born.
It works soooooooo much better.
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It may not be in the kernel, but you can do all of that with ZFS. It has some pretty serious limitations though, like they insist that you not trust a SLOG which is not battery backed, and that you not use cheap hard drives (with shingled recording) while the I in RAID literally means inexpensive. They also insist that you will have problems if you have disks on USB. All of those things may be bad ideas, but people commonly want to do them, and finding ways to accommodate them is a reasonable ask.
To use a c