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Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

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Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#221

Post by Icathian »

koverstreet wrote: post #159
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

that would be bcachefs :) It's an entirely clean slate design, and I spent years taking my time on the core planning out the design; it's as close to perfect as I can make it. The only things I can think of that I would change or add given unlimited time and budget: - It should be written in Rust, and even better a Rust + dependent types (which I suspect could be done with proc macros) for formal verification. And ca…

I happen to work at a company that uses a ton of capnp internally and this is the first time I've seen it mentioned much outside of here. Would you mind describing what about it you think would make it a good fit for something like bcachefs?

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#222

Post by JackSlateur »

koverstreet wrote: post #126
immibis wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem was that you weren't following the rules. The rules were clear about the right time to merge things so they get in the next version, and if you don't, they will have to get in the version after that. I don't know the specific time since I'm not a kernel developer, but there was one. Linus is trying to run the release cycle on a strict schedule, like a train station. You are trying to delay the train so th…

It's a bugfix, and bugfixes are allowed at and time - weighing regression risk against where we're at in the cycle. It was a very high severity bug, low regression risk for the fix, and we were at rc3.

Reading https://lore.kernel.org/all/4xkggoquxqprvphz2hwnir7nnuygeybf...

It is a not a bugfix, and you know it :(

If you are not acting on bad faith, I suggest you read Wittgensen

He has made a lot of work around the idea of language, which basically boil down to the fact that words have no intrinsic meaning : the meaning of a word is the meaning that a given population gives to that word

So in your case, you may be right about the meaning of the word "bugfix" in some population, but you must translate and use the meaning of that word in the "kernel" population

The dictionary is a lie .. :)

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#223

Post by mort96 »

tw04 wrote: post #127
betaby wrote: 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…

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/

To me, ZFS on Linux is extremely uninteresting except for the specific use case of a NAS with a bunch of drives. I don't want to deal with out-of-tree filesystems unless I absolutely have to. And even on a NAS, I would want the root partition to be ext4 or btrfs or something else that's in the kernel.

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#224

Post by mort96 »

koverstreet wrote: post #101
tarruda wrote: post #46

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.

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's so sad to see an excellent engineer such as yourself, building what seems like an excellent filesystem that has the potential to be better than everything else available for Linux for many use cases, completely fail to achieve your goals because you lack the people skills to navigate working as a part of a team under a technical leader. Every comment and e-mail I've seen from you has demonstrated an impressive lack of understanding with regard to why you're being treated as you are.

You don't have to agree with all other maintainers on everything, but if you're working on Linux (or any other major project that's owned, run and developed by other people), you need to have the people skills to at a minimum avoid pissing everyone else off. Or you need to delegate the communication work to someone with those skills. It's a shame you don't.

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#225

Post by thoroughburro »

koverstreet wrote: post #142
tarruda wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

This sort of misrepresentation of your public behavior will only trash your reputation further. I encourage anyone who reads this to actually look up the mailing list threads. It’s very illuminating.

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#226

Post by thoroughburro »

koverstreet wrote: post #126
immibis wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem was that you weren't following the rules. The rules were clear about the right time to merge things so they get in the next version, and if you don't, they will have to get in the version after that. I don't know the specific time since I'm not a kernel developer, but there was one. Linus is trying to run the release cycle on a strict schedule, like a train station. You are trying to delay the train so th…

It's a bugfix, and bugfixes are allowed at and time - weighing regression risk against where we're at in the cycle. It was a very high severity bug, low regression risk for the fix, and we were at rc3.

Do your really want to slip from being difficult to work with to being a liar? Be careful.

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#227

Post by IgorPartola »

quotemstr wrote: post #166
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/

> works great. I will not use or recommend ZFS on _any_ OS until they solve the double page cache problem. A filesystem has no business running its own damned page cache that duplicates the OS one. I don't give a damn if ZFS has a fancy eviction algorithm. ARC's patent is expired. Go port it to mainline Linux if it's not that good. Just don't make inner platform.

That’s such a weird hill to die on. It’s like refusing to drive a car because it uses head bolts instead of head studs in an engine.

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#228

Post by thoroughburro »

Muromec wrote: post #77
sevg wrote: post #9

Is it just me or does Kent seem self-destructively glued to his own idea of how kernel development should work? I don’t doubt that people on all sides have made mis-steps, but from the outside it mostly just seems like Kent doesn’t want to play by the rules (despite having been given years of patience).

autism is a hell of a social disability sometimes.

Don’t smear all of us with the bad behavior one.

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#229

Post by p_l »

koverstreet wrote: post #117
magicalhippo wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> XFS is quite a bit better than btrfs, and I believe ZFS, because they have a ton of ways to reconstruct from redundant metadata if they lose a btree root As I understand it ZFS also has a lot of redundant metatdata (copies=3 on anything important), and also previous uberblocks[1]. In what way is XFS better? Genuine question, not really familiar with XFS. [1]: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSMeta…

I can't speak with any authority on ZFS, I know its structure the least out of all the major filesystems. I do a ton of reading through forums gathering user input, and lots of people chime in with stories of lost filesystems. I've seen reports of lost filesystems with ZFS and I want to say I've seen them at around the same frequency of XFS; both are very rare. My concern with ZFS is that they seem to have taken the…

The lack of traditional 'fsck' is because its operation would be exact same as normal driver operation. The most extreme case involves a very obscure option that lets you explicitly rewind transactions to one you specify, which I've seen used to recover a broken driver upgrade that led to filesystem corruption in ways that most FSCK just barf on, including XFS'

For low-level meddling and recovery, there's a filesystem debugger that understands all parts of ZFS and can help for example identifying previous uberblock that is uncorrupted, or recovering specific data, etc.

Re: Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

#230

Post by ranger_danger »

motorest wrote: post #174
ranger_danger wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this attitude is exactly why this happened. I would have done the same thing. Do you argue with your school teachers that your book report shouldn't be due on Friday because it's not perfect yet? I read several of your response threads across different websites. The most interesting to me was LWN, about the debian tools, where an actual psychologist got involved. All the discussions seem to show the same issu…

> All the discussions seem to show the same issue: You disagree with policies held by people higher up than you, and you struggle with respecting their decisions and moving on. I think it's less subtle than that. The straw that broke the camel's back was quite literally abuse towards other kernel developers. https://lwn.net/Articles/999197/

I think that abuse falls under "struggling" to respect their decisions, but yes I agree that was a big part of it.
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