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Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"

(lwn.net)
214 points ksec | 5 comments | 30 Aug 25 13:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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LeoPanthera ◴[30 Aug 25 17:28 UTC] No.45076431[source]▶
It's orphaned in Debian as well, but I'm not sure what significant advantages it has over btrfs, which is very stable these days.
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betaby ◴[30 Aug 25 17:47 UTC] No.45076586[source]▶
btrfs was unusable in multi disk setup for kernels 6.1 and older. Didn't try since then. How's stable btrs today in such setups?

Also see https://www.phoronix.com/news/Josef-Bacik-Leaves-Meta

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LeoPanthera ◴[30 Aug 25 17:52 UTC] No.45076637[source]▶
It's sort of frustrating that this constantly comes up. It's true that btrfs does have issues with RAID-5 and RAID-6 configurations, but this is frequently used (not necessarily by you) as some kind of gotcha as to why you shouldn't use it at all. That's insane. I promise that disk spanning issues won't affect your use of it on your tiny ThinkPad SSD.

It's important to note that striping and mirroring works just fine. It's only the 5/6 modes that are unstable: https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/Status.html#block-gro...

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AaronFriel ◴[30 Aug 25 18:00 UTC] No.45076727{3}[source]▶
Respectfully to the maintainers:

How can this be a stable filesystem if parity is unstable and risks data loss?

How has this been allowed to happen?

It just seems so profoundly unserious to me.

replies(1): >>45077432 #
1. wtallis ◴[30 Aug 25 19:42 UTC] No.45077432{4}[source]▶
Does the whole filesystem need to be marked as unstable if it has a single experimental feature? Is any other filesystem held to that standard?
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2. AaronFriel ◴[31 Aug 25 00:39 UTC] No.45079309[source]▶
Parity support in multi-disk arrays is older than I am, it's a fairly standard feature. btrfs doesn't support this without data loss risks after 17 years of development.
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3. wtallis ◴[31 Aug 25 04:53 UTC] No.45080483[source]▶
If you're not interested in a multi-disk storage system that doesn't have (stable, non-experimental) parity modes, that's a valid personal preference but not at all a justification for the position that the rest of the features cannot be stable and that the project as a whole cannot be taken seriously by anyone.
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4. nextaccountic ◴[31 Aug 25 07:18 UTC] No.45081095[source]▶
Maybe this specific feature should be marked as unstable and default to disabled on most kernel builds unless you add something like btrfs.experimental=1 to the kernel line or something
5. AaronFriel ◴[31 Aug 25 15:47 UTC] No.45084096{3}[source]▶
Is that what I said?