Also see https://www.phoronix.com/news/Josef-Bacik-Leaves-Meta
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...
Ad hominem. My thinkpad ssd is massive.
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.
I also have had to deal with thousands of nodes kernel panicing due to a btrfs bug in linux kernel 6.8 (stable ubuntu release).
Single, dup, raid0, raid1, raid10 have been usable and stable for a decade or more.
*caveat: I’m using RAID 10, not a parity RAID. It could have problems with parity RAID. So? If you really really want RAID 5, then just use md to make your RAID 5 device and put btrfs on top.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42221564 - 2024-11-23, 103 comments
I don’t doubt that people on all sides have made mis-steps, but from the outside it mostly just seems like Kent doesn’t want to play by the rules (despite having been given years of patience).
IMHO, what his communications show is an unwillingness to acknowledge that other projects that include his work have focus, priorities, and policies that are not the same as that of his project. Also, expecting exceptions to be made for his case, since exceptions have been made in other cases.
Again IMHO, I think he would be better off developing apart with an announcement mailing list. When urgent changes are made, send to the announcement list. Let other interested parties sort out the process of getting those changes into the kernel and distributions.
If people come with bug reports from old versions distributed by others, let them know how to get the most up to date version from his repository, and maybe gently poke the distributors.
Yes, that means users will have older versions and not get fixes immediately. But what he's doing isn't working to get fixes to users immediately either.
I agree that the kernel community can be a hostile environment.
Though I’d argue that people _have_ tried to explain things to Kent, multiple times. At least a few have been calm, respectful attempts.
Sadly, Kent responds to everything in an email except the key part that is being pointed out to him (usually his behavior). Or deflects by going on the attack. And generally refuses to apologise.
I just think that while, yes, the kernel folks have tried to explain, they didn't explain well. The "why" of it is a people thing. Linus needs to be able to trust that people he's delegated some authority will respect its limits. The maintainers need to be able to trust that each other maintainer will respect the area that they have been delegated authority over. I think that Kent genuinely doesn't get this.
Behaviour sounds like the least important part of code contributions. I smell overpowered, should've-been-a-kindergarten-teacher code of conduct person overreach.
Kent just does not listen. Every time the discussion starts from the top. Even if you do agree on some compromise, in a month or two he'll just do the same thing again and all the same arguments start again.
You can't expect people to detail about four or five years of context in every single engagement for the benefit of interested 3rd parties like you or me.
Kent seems very patient in explaining his position (and frustrations arising from other people introducing bugs to his code) and the kernel & debian folks are performing a smearing campaign instead of replying to what I see are genuine problems in the process. As an example, the quotes that are referenced by user paravoid are, imho, taken out of context (judging by reading the provided links).
There probably is a lot more history to it, but judging from that thread it's not Kent who looks like a bad guy.
This is one of the problems: Kent is frequently unable to accept that things don't go his way. He will keep bringing it up again and again and he just grinds people down with it. If you see just one bit of it then it may seem somewhat reasonable, but it's really not because this is the umpteenth time this exact discussion is happening and it's groundhog day once again.
This is a major reason why people burn out on Kent. You can't just have a disagreement/conflict and resolve it. Everything is a discussion with Kent. He can't just shrug and say "well, I think that's a bit silly, but okay, I can work with it, I guess". The options are 1) Kent gets his way, or 2) he will keep pushing it (not infrequently ignoring previous compromises, restarting the discussion from square one).
Even as an interested onlooker who is otherwise uninvolved and generally more willing to accept difficult behaviour than most people, I've rather soured on Kent over the years.
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.
Yeah nah, have you tried processing terabytes of data every day and storing them? It gets better now with DDR5 but bit flips do actually happen.
And maybe below it.
And backups.
Backups make a lot of this minor.
You can certainly add verification above and below your filesystem, but the filesystem seems like a good layer to have verification. Capturing a checksum while writing and verifying it while reading seems appropriate; zfs scrub is a convenient way to check everything on a regular basis. Personally, my data feels important enough to make that level of effort, but not important enough to do anything else.
> Personally, my data feels important enough to make that level of effort, but not important enough to do anything else.
OMG. Backups! You need backups! Worry about polishing your geek cred once your data is on physically separate storage. Seriously, this is not a technology choice problem. Go to Amazon and buy an exfat stick, whatever. By far the most important thing you're ever going to do for your data is Back. It. Up.
Filesystem choice is, and I repeat, very much a yell-on-the-internet kind of thing. It makes you feel smart on HN. Backups to junky Chinese flash sticks are what are going to save you from losing data.
I wouldn't comment but I feel like I'm naturally on your side of the argument and want to see it articulated well.
O_o
Apparently I've been living under a rock, can you please show us a link about this? I was just recently (casually) looking into bolting ZFS/BTRFS-like partial snapshot features to simulate my own atomic distro where I am able to freely roll back if an update goes bad. Think Linux's Timeshift with something little extra.
https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/device-mapper/snapshot.h...
As for the snapshots, things like LVM snapshots are pretty coarse, especially for someone like me where I run dm-crypt on top of LVM
I’d say zfs would be pretty well missed with its data integrity features. I’ve heard that btrfs is worse in that aspect, so given that btrfs saved my bacon with a dying ssd, I can only imagine what zfs does.
The dm stuff is one key for the entire partition and you can't check it for bitrot or repair it without the key.
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.
*Coming from the extremely well thought out and documented zfs utilities to btrfs will have you wondering wtf fairly frequently while you learn your way around.
Volundr•3h ago
mustache_kimono•3h ago
Your distro could very easily include bcachefs if it wishes? Although I think the ZFS + Linux situation is mostly Linux religiosity gone wild, that very particular problem doesn't exist re: bcachefs?
The problem with bcachefs is the problem with btrfs. It mostly still doesn't work to solve the problems ZFS already solves.
kstrauser•2h ago
I can think of non-religious reasons to want to avoid legal fights with Oracle.
jchw•2h ago
I think the Linux Kernel just doesn't want to be potentially in violation of Oracle's copyrights. That really doesn't seem that unreasonable to me, even if it feels pointless to you.
NewJazz•2h ago
https://github.com/chimera-linux/ckms
WD-42•2h ago
ffsm8•2h ago
* Another kernel Dev takes over management and they tread it as a fork (highly unlikely according to their estimate)
* Kent hires someone to upstream the changes for him and Kent stops complaining wrt when it's getting merged
* Bcachefs gets no maintenance and will likely be removed in the next major release
I do not know him personally, but most interactions I've read online by him sounded grounded and not particularly offensive, so I'm abstaining from making any kind of judgement on it.
But while I have no stake in this, Drama really does seem to follow Kent around for one reason or another. And it's never his fault if you take him by his public statements - which I want to repeat: he sounds very grounded and not offensive to me whatsoever.
sarlalian•1h ago
He’s not super offensive, but he will tell a Debian package maintainer that their process sucks, and the should change it and they are being stupid by following that process. Overall, he seems a bit entitled, and unwilling to compromise with others. It’s not just Kent though, the areas that seem to be the most problematic for him, are when it’s an unstoppable force (Kent), and an immovable wall (Linux / Debian).
Working in the Linux kernel is well known for its frustrations and the personal conflict that it creates, to the point that there are almost no linux kernel devs/maintainers that aren’t paid to do the work. You can see a similar set of events happen with Rust4Linux people, Asahi linux project and their R4L drivers, etc.
tux3•1h ago
Both Linus and Kent drive a hard bargain, and it's not as simple as finding someone else to blindly forward bcachefs patches. At the first sign of conflict, the poor person in the middle would have no power, no way to make anyone back down, and we'd be back to square one.
It's in limbo, and there is still time, but if left to bitrot it will be removed eventually.
immibis•1h ago
tux3•1h ago
The issue is that I have never seen Kent back down a single time. Kent will explain in details why the rules are bullshit and don't apply in this particular case, every single time, without any room for compromise.
If the only problem was when to send patches, that would be one thing. But disagreements over patches aren't just a timing problem that can be routed around.