There is no 'modern' ZFS-like fs in Linux nowadays.
There is no 'modern' ZFS-like fs in Linux nowadays.
zfs is out of tree leaving it as an unviable option for many people. This news means that bcachefs is going to be in a very weird state in-kernel, which leaves only btrfs as the only other in-tree ‘modern’ filesystem.
This news about bcachefs has ramifications about the state of ‘modern’ FSes in Linux, and I’d say this news about the btrfs maintainer taking a step back is related to this.
1. The dm layer gives you cow/snapshots for any filesystem you want already and has for more than a decade. Some implementations actually use it for clever trickery like updates, even. Anyone who has software requirements in this space (as distinct from "wants to yell on the internet about it") is very well served.
2. Compression seems silly in the modern world. Virtually everything is already compressed. To first approximation, every byte in persistent storage anywhere in the world is in a lossy media format. And the ones that aren't are in some other cooked format. The only workloads where you see significant use of losslessly-compressible data are in situations (databases) where you have app-managed storage performance (and who see little value from filesystem choice) or ones (software building, data science, ML training) where there's lots of ephemeral intermediate files being produced. And again those are usages where fancy filesystems are poorly deployed, you're going to throw it all away within hours to days anyway.
Filesystems are a solved problem. If ZFS disappeared from the world today... really who would even care? Only those of us still around trying to shout on the internet.
A block level cache like bcache (not fs) and dm-cache handles it less ideally, and doesn't leave the SSD space as usable space. As a home user, 2TB of SSDs is 2TB of space I'd rather have. ZFS's ZIL is similar, not leaving it as usable space. Btrfs has some recent work in differentiating drives to store metadata on the faster drives (allocator hints), but that only does metadata as there is no handling of moving data to HDDs over time. Even Microsoft's ReFS does tiered storage I believe.
I just want to have 1 or 2 SSDs, with 1 or 2 HDDs in a single filesystem that gets the advantages of SSDs with recently used files and new writes, and moves all the LRU files to the HDDs. And probably keep all the metadata on the SSDs too.
You were not alone. However, things changed, namely SSD continued to become cheaper and grew in capacity. I'd think most active data is these days on SSDs (certainly in most desktops, most servers which aren't explicit file or DB servers and all mobile and embedded devices), the role of spinning rust being more and more archiving (if found in a system at all).
Also for video games, where performance matters, game sizes are huge, and it's nice to have a bunch of games installed.