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Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

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Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#41

Post by doubletwoyou »

ajross wrote: post #34
doubletwoyou wrote: post #31

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…

I know my own personal anecdote isn’t much, but I’ve noticed pretty good space savings on the order of like 100 GB from zstd compression and CoW on my personal disks with btrfs

As for the snapshots, things like LVM snapshots are pretty coarse, especially for someone like me where I run dm-crypt on top of LVM

I’d say zfs would be pretty well missed with its data integrity features. I’ve heard that btrfs is worse in that aspect, so given that btrfs saved my bacon with a dying ssd, I can only imagine what zfs does.

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#42

Post by ffsm8 »

WD-42 wrote: post #26
Volundr wrote: post #2

Damn. I was enjoying not having to deal with the fun of ZFS and DKMS, but it seems like now bcachefs will be in the same boat, either dealing with DKMS and occasional breakage or sticking with the kernel version that slowly gets more and more out of date.

The article says that bcachefs is not being removed from the mainline kernel. This looks like mostly a workaround for Linus and other kernel devs to not have to deal with Kent directly.

The three listed options in the OP thread were

* Another kernel Dev takes over management and they tread it as a fork (highly unlikely according to their estimate)

* Kent hires someone to upstream the changes for him and Kent stops complaining wrt when it's getting merged

* Bcachefs gets no maintenance and will likely be removed in the next major release

I do not know him personally, but most interactions I've read online by him sounded grounded and not particularly offensive, so I'm abstaining from making any kind of judgement on it.

But while I have no stake in this, Drama really does seem to follow Kent around for one reason or another. And it's never his fault if you take him by his public statements - which I want to repeat: he sounds very grounded and not offensive to me whatsoever.

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#43

Post by williamstein »

deknos wrote: post #37
betaby wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So do I and BTRFS is extremely good these days. It's also much faster than ZFS at mounting a disk with a large number of filesystems (=subvolumes), which is critical for building certain types of fileservers at scale. In contrast, ZFS scales horribly as the number of filesystems increases, where btrfs seems to be O(1). btrfs's quota functionality is also much better than it used to be (and very flexible), after all the work Meta put into it. Finally, having the option of easy writable snapshots is nice. BTRFS is fantastic!

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#44

Post by [deleted] »

pdimitar wrote: post #38
ajross wrote: 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…

[deleted]

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#45

Post by jchw »

mustache_kimono wrote: post #15
Volundr wrote: post #2

Damn. I was enjoying not having to deal with the fun of ZFS and DKMS, but it seems like now bcachefs will be in the same boat, either dealing with DKMS and occasional breakage or sticking with the kernel version that slowly gets more and more out of date.

> Damn. I was enjoying not having to deal with the fun of ZFS and DKMS, but it seems like now bcachefs will be in the same boat, either dealing with DKMS and occasional breakage or sticking with the kernel version that slowly gets more and more out of date. Your distro could very easily include bcachefs if it wishes? Although I think the ZFS + Linux situation is mostly Linux religiosity gone wild, that very particula…

> Although I think the ZFS + Linux situation is mostly Linux religiosity gone wild,

I think the Linux Kernel just doesn't want to be potentially in violation of Oracle's copyrights. That really doesn't seem that unreasonable to me, even if it feels pointless to you.

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#46

Post by tarruda »

Since the existing bcachefs driver will not be removed, and the problem is the bcachefs developer not following the rules, I wonder if someone else could take on the role of pulling bcachefs changes into the mainline, while also following the merge window rules.

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#47

Post by tux3 »

WD-42 wrote: post #26
Volundr wrote: post #2

Damn. I was enjoying not having to deal with the fun of ZFS and DKMS, but it seems like now bcachefs will be in the same boat, either dealing with DKMS and occasional breakage or sticking with the kernel version that slowly gets more and more out of date.

The article says that bcachefs is not being removed from the mainline kernel. This looks like mostly a workaround for Linus and other kernel devs to not have to deal with Kent directly.

It's complicated, no one really knows what "externally maintained" entails at the moment. Linus is not exactly poised to pull directly from Kent, and there is no solution lined-up at the moment.

Both Linus and Kent drive a hard bargain, and it's not as simple as finding someone else to blindly forward bcachefs patches. At the first sign of conflict, the poor person in the middle would have no power, no way to make anyone back down, and we'd be back to square one.

It's in limbo, and there is still time, but if left to bitrot it will be removed eventually.

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#48

Post by bombcar »

anon-3988 wrote: post #36
ajross wrote: 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.

Bit flips can happen, and if it’s a problem you should have additional verification above the filesystem layer, even if using ZFS.

And maybe below it.

And backups.

Backups make a lot of this minor.

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#49

Post by ffsm8 »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #24
LeoPanthera wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sort of frustrating that this constantly comes up. It's true that btrfs does have issues with RAID-5 and RAID-6 configurations, but this is frequently used (not necessarily by you) as some kind of gotcha as to why you shouldn't use it at all. That's insane. I promise that disk spanning issues won't affect your use of it on your tiny ThinkPad SSD. It's important to note that striping and mirroring works just fine…

How can I know what configurations of btrfs lose my data? I also have had to deal with thousands of nodes kernel panicing due to a btrfs bug in linux kernel 6.8 (stable ubuntu release).

I thought the usual recommendation was to use mdadm to build the disk pool and then use btrfs on top of that - but that might be out of date. I haven't used it in a while

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#50

Post by opan »

cozzyd wrote: post #25
vorgol wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sadly my nonacore phone's soul is too heavy (or light)? to visit that site.

Worked on my OnePlus 8T running LineageOS with no gapps and using Fennec F-Droid for the browser. Could you have a useragent or extension[1] it didn't like? I know that on my PC, GNOME's Gitlab specifically required me to change my UA to get it to load while every other Anubis config I've come across has been fine. I do notice LKML's is using difficulty 4, though, which I think is higher than I usually see.

[1] Due to an unrelated bug in latest Fennec, I currently have all my extensions disabled or else all pages stop loading at all. Normally use uBlock Origin, Tampermonkey, etc.

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