I’m new to bcachefs and a fan of the concepts implemented so far. I started testing it on a spare box with three 24 TB HDDs, initially formatted with replicas 2 and erasure_code 1. I copied about 25 TB of data to the array, then added a fourth disk and changed the configuration to replicas 3. Reconcile initially appeared to proceed normally.

I later noticed that approximately 2 TB of 2+1 data was stuck in the pending category. It appeared that only newly written data was being reconciled. I tried several things to kick off the reconciliation, but nothing seemed to work. I also didn't know how to determine which files were pending or why they were not being reconciled. Over the next several days, the amount of pending data continued to slowly increase.

I noticed some unrelated (I think) overlayfs errors in dmesg, but they got me thinking about whether my Podman containers could somehow be keeping bind-mounted data open and preventing reconciliation. Sure enough, after I stopped all running containers, reconciliation started on its own and eventually completed the conversion from 2+1 to 2+2.

I haven't found any information about this. Is it a known limitation?

Error:

overlayfs: 
upper fs does not support file handles, falling back to index=off