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Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

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Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#31
post #22
post #12

The sad part, that despite the years of the development BTRS never reached the parity with ZFS. And yesterday's news "Josef Bacik who is a long-time Btrfs developer and active co-maintainer alongside David Sterba is leaving Meta. Additionally, he's also stepping back from Linux kernel development as his primary job." see https://www.phoronix.com/news/Josef-Bacik-Leaves-Meta There is no 'modern' ZFS-like fs in Linux n…

This isn’t BTRFS

This might not be directly about btrfs but bcachefs zfs and btrfs are the only filesystems for Linux that provide modern features like transparent compression, snapshots, and CoW.

zfs is out of tree leaving it as an unviable option for many people. This news means that bcachefs is going to be in a very weird state in-kernel, which leaves only btrfs as the only other in-tree ‘modern’ filesystem.

This news about bcachefs has ramifications about the state of ‘modern’ FSes in Linux, and I’d say this news about the btrfs maintainer taking a step back is related to this.

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#32
post #13

[flagged]

"Get your head examined. And get the fuck out of here with this shit." -- Kent Overstreet, bcachefs maintainer: https://lore.kernel.org/all/citv2v6f33hoidq75xd2spaqxf7nl5wb...

Thanks for that link, I dig this kind of kernel drama

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#33
post #19

FreeBSD is giving me a sultry look as I ponder my NAS build.

I'm in that boat. I'm looking over at that Synology unit sitting in the corner of my living room, knowing it'll be the last of its kind to live here, and wondering what its replacement will look like. FreeBSD's been good to me and it might be time to reintroduce myself to it.

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#34
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn’t BTRFS

This might not be directly about btrfs but bcachefs zfs and btrfs are the only filesystems for Linux that provide modern features like transparent compression, snapshots, and CoW. zfs is out of tree leaving it as an unviable option for many people. This news means that bcachefs is going to be in a very weird state in-kernel, which leaves only btrfs as the only other in-tree ‘modern’ filesystem. This news about bcache…

Meh. This war was stale like nine years ago. At this point the originally-beaten horse has decomposed into soil. My general reply to this is:

1. The dm layer gives you cow/snapshots for any filesystem you want already and has for more than a decade. Some implementations actually use it for clever trickery like updates, even. Anyone who has software requirements in this space (as distinct from "wants to yell on the internet about it") is very well served.

2. Compression seems silly in the modern world. Virtually everything is already compressed. To first approximation, every byte in persistent storage anywhere in the world is in a lossy media format. And the ones that aren't are in some other cooked format. The only workloads where you see significant use of losslessly-compressible data are in situations (databases) where you have app-managed storage performance (and who see little value from filesystem choice) or ones (software building, data science, ML training) where there's lots of ephemeral intermediate files being produced. And again those are usages where fancy filesystems are poorly deployed, you're going to throw it all away within hours to days anyway.

Filesystems are a solved problem. If ZFS disappeared from the world today... really who would even care? Only those of us still around trying to shout on the internet.

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#35
post #11

It's orphaned in Debian as well, but I'm not sure what significant advantages it has over btrfs, which is very stable these days.

btrfs was unusable in multi disk setup for kernels 6.1 and older. Didn't try since then. How's stable btrs today in such setups? Also see https://www.phoronix.com/news/Josef-Bacik-Leaves-Meta

I’ve been running btrfs on a little home Debian NAS for over a year now. I have no complaints - it’s been working smoothly, doing exactly what I want. I have a heterogeneous set of probably 6 discs, >20TB total, no problems.

*caveat: I’m using RAID 10, not a parity RAID. It could have problems with parity RAID. So? If you really really want RAID 5, then just use md to make your RAID 5 device and put btrfs on top.

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#36
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might not be directly about btrfs but bcachefs zfs and btrfs are the only filesystems for Linux that provide modern features like transparent compression, snapshots, and CoW. zfs is out of tree leaving it as an unviable option for many people. This news means that bcachefs is going to be in a very weird state in-kernel, which leaves only btrfs as the only other in-tree ‘modern’ filesystem. This news about bcache…

Meh. This war was stale like nine years ago. At this point the originally-beaten horse has decomposed into soil. My general reply to this is: 1. The dm layer gives you cow/snapshots for any filesystem you want already and has for more than a decade. Some implementations actually use it for clever trickery like updates, even. Anyone who has software requirements in this space (as distinct from "wants to yell on the in…

> Filesystems are a solved problem. If ZFS disappeared from the world today... really who would even care? Only those of us still around trying to shout on the internet.

Yeah nah, have you tried processing terabytes of data every day and storing them? It gets better now with DDR5 but bit flips do actually happen.

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#37
post #11

It's orphaned in Debian as well, but I'm not sure what significant advantages it has over btrfs, which is very stable these days.

btrfs was unusable in multi disk setup for kernels 6.1 and older. Didn't try since then. How's stable btrs today in such setups? Also see https://www.phoronix.com/news/Josef-Bacik-Leaves-Meta

i run btrfs on servers and desktops. it's usuable.

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#38
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might not be directly about btrfs but bcachefs zfs and btrfs are the only filesystems for Linux that provide modern features like transparent compression, snapshots, and CoW. zfs is out of tree leaving it as an unviable option for many people. This news means that bcachefs is going to be in a very weird state in-kernel, which leaves only btrfs as the only other in-tree ‘modern’ filesystem. This news about bcache…

Meh. This war was stale like nine years ago. At this point the originally-beaten horse has decomposed into soil. My general reply to this is: 1. The dm layer gives you cow/snapshots for any filesystem you want already and has for more than a decade. Some implementations actually use it for clever trickery like updates, even. Anyone who has software requirements in this space (as distinct from "wants to yell on the in…

> The dm layer gives you cow/snapshots for any filesystem you want already and has for more than a decade. Some implementations actually use it for clever trickery like updates, even.

O_o

Apparently I've been living under a rock, can you please show us a link about this? I was just recently (casually) looking into bolting ZFS/BTRFS-like partial snapshot features to simulate my own atomic distro where I am able to freely roll back if an update goes bad. Think Linux's Timeshift with something little extra.

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#39
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh. This war was stale like nine years ago. At this point the originally-beaten horse has decomposed into soil. My general reply to this is: 1. The dm layer gives you cow/snapshots for any filesystem you want already and has for more than a decade. Some implementations actually use it for clever trickery like updates, even. Anyone who has software requirements in this space (as distinct from "wants to yell on the in…

> Filesystems are a solved problem. If ZFS disappeared from the world today... really who would even care? Only those of us still around trying to shout on the internet. Yeah nah, have you tried processing terabytes of data every day and storing them? It gets better now with DDR5 but bit flips do actually happen.

[deleted]

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#40
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh. This war was stale like nine years ago. At this point the originally-beaten horse has decomposed into soil. My general reply to this is: 1. The dm layer gives you cow/snapshots for any filesystem you want already and has for more than a decade. Some implementations actually use it for clever trickery like updates, even. Anyone who has software requirements in this space (as distinct from "wants to yell on the in…

> The dm layer gives you cow/snapshots for any filesystem you want already and has for more than a decade. Some implementations actually use it for clever trickery like updates, even. O_o Apparently I've been living under a rock, can you please show us a link about this? I was just recently (casually) looking into bolting ZFS/BTRFS-like partial snapshot features to simulate my own atomic distro where I am able to fre…

There are downsides to adding features in layers, as opposed to integrating them with the FS, but dm can do quite a lot:

https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/device-mapper/snapshot.h...

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