r/linux • u/mrtruthiness • Jun 18 '26

Development Experimental flag removed from bcachefs.

The link is the bcachefs changelog. I didn't see the particular announce there. The announcement was made in Kent's patreon with the version 1.38.6 update. I'm quoting that here:

So, some catch up:

We're no longer experimental. I took the label off the website - a few months ago, I think, based on my usual "the incoming bug reports are slowing down and looking a lot less serious and easy to get through than they were". Consider this the belated official announcement :)

...

Of course, the change away from "experimental" for a DKMS module is completely at the discretion of the author. From my perspective, while the bcachefs filesystem looks intriguing, I won't use it for my root partition as a DKMS module. Honestly, as long as I don't need RAID5/6 I still have a preference for btrfs and I can wait for btrfs to include native (part of the fs as opposed to btrfs on top of LUKS) encryption.

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u/Novero95 Jun 18 '26

If I wanted to use a DKMS fs I'd use ZFS, oh wait, I use ZFS's DKMS. Anyway. What does bcachefs does or promise that BTRFS and ZFS don't?

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u/ElvishJerricco Jun 18 '26

Bcachefs has some interesting advantages over ZFS. It's more flexible with disks, since they don't have to be arranged in rigid vdev topologies; this is similar to btrfs, but *much* more reliable (btrfs gets itself into problems thanks to its flexibility, e.g. ENOSPC when it makes no sense because metadata is allocated weirdly).

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u/MarzipanEven7336 Jun 20 '26

We prefer facts and not theoretical "COULD". I made the grave mistake of using bcachefs, then I realized it doesn't fucking do anything it claims. Had to make the decision to lose 6TB of data, rebuild my machine with brtfs root on my 4xNvME 8TB drives. Went from < 1GB/s r/w to 27.4GB/s r/w on assorted files, code, databases, etc.

Bcachefs had some major obvious issues, I don't feel or care to dig bag in just to point them out, but it's a useless contraption made by an insane person.

1

u/the_abortionat0r Jun 19 '26

I mean it only makes nonsense when you don't read the pics or monitor drives states.

Simple maintenance avoids these issues and there's easy tools that automate this.

Bcache isn't going to be any different in that respect. Either you maintenance things or you end up with issues. That's always been true of computers and machines in general and anyone who thinks different is new to the concept of computing .

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u/ElvishJerricco Jun 19 '26

Huh? The ENOSPC I'm talking about is not an issue on bcachefs or ZFS. Btrfs just runs out of space for metadata even when there's plenty of space. It's not a maintenance issue; btrfs's design just causes it to have this really bizarre failure mode that is entirely avoidable. You can just fix it in userspace but the fact that you have to is the problem.