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Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

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Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#141

Post by qalmakka »

The whole situation is moronic at best. Linux needs a decent modern filesystem in tree. ZFS would easily be it, but unfortunately Sun decided back in the '00s to fuck Linux because they wanted to push Solaris instead. Little they knew ZFS ended up being FreeBSD top feature for years.

Btrfs is constantly eating people data, it's a bad joke nowadays. Right now on Linux you're basically forced to constantly deal with out of tree ZFS or accept that thinly provisioned XFS over LVM2 will inevitably cause you to lose data.

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#142

Post by koverstreet »

tarruda wrote: post #137
koverstreet wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the problem wasn't following the rules. The patch that kicked off the current conflict was the 'journal_rewind' patch; we recently (6.15) had the worst bug in the entire history upstream - it was taking out entire subvolumes. The third report got me a metadata dump with everything I needed to debug the issue, thank god, and now we have a great deal of hardening to ensure a bug like this can never happen again. Su…

It is not good when politics get in the way of good engineering. Regardless of differing points of view on the situation, I think everyone can agree that bcachefs being actively updated on Linus tree is a good thing, right? If you were able to work at your own pace, and someone else took the responsibility of pulling your changes at a pace that satisfies Linus, wouldn't that solve the problem of Linux having a good m…

At this time, I don't think so.

We were never able to get any sane and consistent policy on bugfixes, and I don't have high hopes that anyone else will have better luck. The XFS folks have had their own issues with interference, leading to burnout - they're on their third maintainer, and it's really not good for a project to be cycling through maintainers and burning people out, losing consistency of leadership and institutional knowledge.

And I'm still seeing Linus lashing out at people on practically a weekly basis. I could never ask anyone else to have to deal with that.

I think the kernel community has some things they need to figure out before bcachefs can go back in.

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#143

Post by nichos »

kstrauser wrote: post #33
NewJazz wrote: 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.

Doesn't TrueNAS (Linux version) come with ZFS?

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#144

Post by simoncion »

koverstreet wrote: post #121
arp242 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, I get where you're coming from. It's not unreasonable. I've said this before. But there are also reasons why things are the way they are, and that is also not unreasonable. And at the end of the day: Linus is the boss. It really does come down to that. He has dozens of other subsystem maintainers to deal with and this is the process that works for him. Similar stuff applies to Debian. Personally, I deeply disli…

You have to consider the bigger picture. XFS has burned through maintainers, citing "upstream burnout". It's not just bcachefs that things are broken for. And it was burning me out, too. We need a functioning release process, and we haven't had that; instead I've been getting a ton of drama that's boiled over into the bcachefs community, oftentimes completely drowning out all the calmer, more technical conversations…

[flagged]

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#145

Post by goneri »

qalmakka wrote: post #141

The whole situation is moronic at best. Linux needs a decent modern filesystem in tree. ZFS would easily be it, but unfortunately Sun decided back in the '00s to fuck Linux because they wanted to push Solaris instead. Little they knew ZFS ended up being FreeBSD top feature for years. Btrfs is constantly eating people data, it's a bad joke nowadays. Right now on Linux you're basically forced to constantly deal with ou…

Btrfs is NOT constantly eating people data. You have nothing to back this statement.

It's widely used and the default filesystem of several distributions. Most of the problems are like for the other filesystem: caused by the hardware.

I've been using it for more than 10 years without any problem and enjoy the experience. And like for any filesystem, I backup my data frequently (with btrbk, thanks for asking).

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#146

Post by magicalhippo »

koverstreet wrote: post #133
magicalhippo wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That you or the user dislike some of the downsides does not invalidate an option. I will absolutely agree with you that merging that repair code would be vastly preferable to you and the users. And again, if bcachefs was mature and stable, I absolutely think users should get a way to repair ASAP. But bcachefs is currently experimental and thus one can reasonably expect users to be prepared to deal with the consequenc…

bcachefs has had active users, with real data that they want to protect, since before it was merged. A lot of the bcachefs users are using it explicitly because they've been burned by btrfs and need something more reliable. I am being much, much more conservative with removing the experimental label than past practice, but I have been very explicit that while it may not be perfect yet and users should expect some hic…

Given the bug fixes and changes, the experimental flag seems quite appropriate to me. That's not a bad thing.

However, it was put in the kernel as experimental. That carries with it implications.

As such, while it's very commendable that you wish to support the experimental bcachefs as-if it was production ready, you cannot reasonably impose that wish upon the rest of the kernel.

That said I think you and your small team is doing a commendable job, and I strongly wish you succeed in making bcachefs feature complete and production ready. And I say that as someone who really, really likes ZFS and run it on my Linux boxes.

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#147

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

koverstreet wrote: post #136
tw04 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's literally ZFS-on-linux and it works great. And yes, I will once again say Linus is completely wrong about ZFS and the multiple times he's spoken about it, it's abundantly clear he's never used it or bothered to spend any time researching its features and functionality. https://zfsonlinux.org/

ZFS deserves an absolutely legendary amount of respect for showing us all what a modern filesystem should be - the papers they wrote, alone, did the entire filesystem world such a massive service by demonstrating the possibilities of full data integrity and why we want it, and then they showed it could be done. But there's a ton of room for improvement beyond what ZFS did. ZFS was a very conservative design in a lot…

> But there's a ton of room for improvement beyond what ZFS did.

Say more? I can't say I've really thought that much about filesystems and I'm curious in what direction you think they could be taken if time and budget weren't an issue.

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#148

Post by AaronFriel »

goneri wrote: post #145
qalmakka wrote: post #141

The whole situation is moronic at best. Linux needs a decent modern filesystem in tree. ZFS would easily be it, but unfortunately Sun decided back in the '00s to fuck Linux because they wanted to push Solaris instead. Little they knew ZFS ended up being FreeBSD top feature for years. Btrfs is constantly eating people data, it's a bad joke nowadays. Right now on Linux you're basically forced to constantly deal with ou…

Btrfs is NOT constantly eating people data. You have nothing to back this statement. It's widely used and the default filesystem of several distributions. Most of the problems are like for the other filesystem: caused by the hardware. I've been using it for more than 10 years without any problem and enjoy the experience. And like for any filesystem, I backup my data frequently (with btrbk, thanks for asking).

btrfs has eaten my data, which was probably my bad for trying out a newly stable filesystem around 15 years ago. there are plenty of bug reports of btrfs eating other people's data in the years since.

It's probably mostly stable now, but it's silly to act like it's a paragon of stability in the kernel.

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#149

Post by wtallis »

AaronFriel wrote: post #114
wtallis wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the whole filesystem need to be marked as unstable if it has a single experimental feature? Is any other filesystem held to that standard?

Parity support in multi-disk arrays is older than I am, it's a fairly standard feature. btrfs doesn't support this without data loss risks after 17 years of development.

If you're not interested in a multi-disk storage system that doesn't have (stable, non-experimental) parity modes, that's a valid personal preference but not at all a justification for the position that the rest of the features cannot be stable and that the project as a whole cannot be taken seriously by anyone.

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#150

Post by wtallis »

AaronFriel wrote: post #148
goneri wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Btrfs is NOT constantly eating people data. You have nothing to back this statement. It's widely used and the default filesystem of several distributions. Most of the problems are like for the other filesystem: caused by the hardware. I've been using it for more than 10 years without any problem and enjoy the experience. And like for any filesystem, I backup my data frequently (with btrbk, thanks for asking).

btrfs has eaten my data, which was probably my bad for trying out a newly stable filesystem around 15 years ago. there are plenty of bug reports of btrfs eating other people's data in the years since. It's probably mostly stable now, but it's silly to act like it's a paragon of stability in the kernel.

> but it's silly to act like it's a paragon of stability in the kernel.

And it's dishonest to act like bugs from 15 years ago justify present-tense claims that it is constantly eating people's data and is a bad joke. Nobody's arguing that btrfs doesn't have a past history of data loss, more than a decade ago; that's not what's being questioned here.

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