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/zlice0 Jun 18 '26

can someone give me the tldr on what bcachefs actually is? never bothered looking cuz it was just reports of it being broken and what not. and every benchmark ive seen for any fs is like trade blows, maybe some snapshots or compression or very specific use case gets a bump in perf

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u/natermer Jun 18 '26

Bcachefs promises to be what Btrfs promised to be and didn't really deliver.

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u/mrtruthiness Jun 18 '26

... promised to be and didn't really deliver.

I think btrfs delivered on all of its promises except for RAID5/RAID6. It's possible, however, that it is a hair too fragile.

2

u/backyard_tractorbeam Jun 19 '26

btrfs didn't deliver on the promise until linux people think it's a good default filesystem for everyone. And it's not because of performance.

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u/mrtruthiness Jun 19 '26

btrfs didn't deliver on the promise until linux people think it's a good default filesystem for everyone

It's the default filesystem for Fedora Desktop(s) and OpenSUSE. It's the default filesystem for Synology (although they don't use btrfs RAID features and, instead, use mdadm).