Bcachefs - How mature does it have to be?

Dear @stgraber ,

I just learned about bcachefs and was wondering if you had a look at it already and what features are missing until it can be integrated into Incus/LXC.

Thanks!

There’s an open issue on GitHub. I guess the maturity issue isn’t the real blocker, the blocker is to find a contributor to develop the feature.

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Yeah, our hope was that the project would keep growing while stabilizing, eventually offering something close to ZFS but readily available everywhere thanks to being mainline.

Now that Kent managed to piss off Linus enough to get his filesystem kicked out of the kernel and in general not be on great terms with the distributions when it comes to packaging, it feels like there’s very little to be gained here compared to just using ZFS.

If someone wants to put in the work to implement and maintain a storage driver, we’ll be happy to review and merge it, but given the state of the bcachefs project right now, I don’t think any of us on the core team intend to do any of that work ourselves.

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Yeah, I only searched here for bcachefs for Incus and didn’t do an online search, where I immediately found the issue posted by @bensmrs . But I guess at least now you can also find it here on the forum, so it wasn’t too much of a waste.

@stgraber Thanks also for those further clarifications. Maybe in a while when he actually finishes some improvements over some ZFS flaws it will be worthwhile looking at it again. But that while might be quite long. :sweat_smile:

I think we’d also like to see a bit more maturity around the project itself, so not it just be Kent, but have a busier community of contributors like what we’re seeing with OpenZFS.

Currently there’s quite the bus factor around bcachefs and the fact that Kent seems to have difficulties getting along with others is a bit worrying when it comes to project growth and building up a community.

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