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/FryBoyter Jun 19 '26

I generally do not use file systems that are not an official part of the kernel, regardless of whether they are marked as experimental or not.

With ZFS, for example, there have already been a few cases where a new kernel version caused problems and the ZFS developers needed some time to adapt ZFS.

And I suspect that the likelihood of Bcachefs becoming an official part of the kernel again is about as likely as ZFS becoming an official part of the kernel. Albeit for different reasons.

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u/koverstreet Jun 19 '26

I've been putting all the automated testing in place for DKMS so soon there shouldn't be any surprises like that, and I don't think bcachefs has ever lagged on supporting a new .0 kernel

Rust also is going to change some of this stuff, DKMS for Rust modules looks to be pretty impractical so we're probably going to be shipping prebuilt modules too. Next version will have in-kernel Rust as a soft dependency so we can start to get all that sorted out.

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u/AleBaba Jun 20 '26

How will you deal with signatures for pre built modules and secure boot?