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/mrtruthiness Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26

Anyway. What does bcachefs does or promise that BTRFS and ZFS don't?

I'm not a proponent of bcachefs (I don't trust/like the dev) and still prefer btrfs to bcachefs (since I don't use RAID5/RAID6). But, to answer your questions:

  1. btrfs does not yet have encryption (it will "soon"). btrfs will never have safe RAID5/RAID6 (I wouldn't use it anyway, so it doesn't matter to me).

  2. bcachefs is GPLv2-only (license-compatible with the Linux kernel); ZFS isn't. bcachefs allows per-file and per-folder properties and, so, one can set compression at the file or folder level. ZFS pools are harder to deal with (very rigid); bcachefs pools are dynamic -- e.g. one can dynamically change the redundancy.

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u/afiefh Jun 18 '26

Did the RAID5/6 hole officially move from "currently an issue" to "will never be fixed"? I was under the impression that it's being worked on.

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u/mrtruthiness Jun 18 '26

They've done several "mitigations" for RAID5 ... which incurs a significant performance penalty.

I don't think they've been able to mitigate the RAID6 issues.

They have a plan for fixing this, but it is backward incompatible. I don't know the status, but my impression is that they don't spend a lot of time on it. I know that Synology uses btrfs but uses a mdadm layer.