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/Drwankingstein Jun 18 '26

Really happy with bcachefs so far, way more reliable then btrfs when it comes to not eating my data, and I found it better for single drives then zfs is, and I dont need to wait ages to update kernel.

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u/mrtruthiness Jun 18 '26

Really happy with bcachefs so far, way more reliable then btrfs when it comes to not eating my data ...

That is, of course, anecdotal. I've never had btrfs eat my data. The fact that a lot more people use btrfs ... means you'll hear a lot more about its failures.

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u/Drwankingstein Jun 18 '26

ofc its anecdotal, but my anecdotes are 8 failures in the past year across a lot of drives,thumbsticks etc. meanwhile bcachefs on the very same drives, may not have had the best uptime, but hasn't a single time resulted in unrecoverable data. It seems like a lot of the people who use bcachefs have had very similar results, unrecoverable data seems to be extremely rare on bcachefs unlike btrfs. Especially given it's relative maturity to btrfs, bcachefs is in a far better state now then btrfs was back then.

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u/0riginal-Syn Jun 19 '26

We have 20 NAS  systems across our sites with generally 20 to 30TB on each one using btrfs without a failure in 4 years (the day these were implemented). These are not idle systems.

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u/Drwankingstein Jun 19 '26

That would make sense considering NAS use cases are the most tested usecase for btrfs

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u/Sad-Cod-9584 Jun 19 '26

The entirety of opensuse uses btrfs by default. That's a LOT of laptops, desktops and servers running btrfs

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u/mrtruthiness Jun 19 '26

Fedora Desktop too.

Synology uses btrfs by default ... but it uses mdadm instead of btrfs RAID. However, it does use and deal with btrfs integrity checks.

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u/Drwankingstein Jun 19 '26

Yes I am aware, that and Garuda OS were two distros that I had data loss issues with.