SUSE reaffirms support for Btrfs

Posted Aug 24, 2017 22:49 UTC (Thu) by BillyBob (guest, #118071)
In reply to: SUSE reaffirms support for Btrfs by drag
Parent article: SUSE reaffirms support for Btrfs

> Meanwhile it would be nice if somebody picked up the
> currently-seeking-employment developer of Bcachefs, Kent Overstreet, and
> help him get his project up to the point where it can be made ready for
> inclusion into the kernel. It has a lot of promise.

While I don't disagree that bcachefs shows promise the fact that the project's sole developer decided to take something like two and a half months off to go backpacking doesn't exactly inspire a ton of confidence. It was only in the last 24 hours that the project's git repo has shown any sign of life since 2017-06-13.

Also, bcachefs, while promising hasn't reached anything anywhere near feature parity with Btrfs. As things stand now bcachefs still lacks properly implemented compression, replication, functional checksum scrubing, and any sign of snapshotting. The lack of snapshot support is what I find most troubling as Kent himself even states:

> snapshots are by far the most complex of the remaining features to implement - it's
> going to be quite awhile before I can dedicate enough time to finishing them, but
> I'm very much looking forward to showing off what it'll be able to do."

I'm not trying to bash Kent or bcachefs; I'm simply trying to point out that as a Btrfs competitor it has a long way to go and for the last few months it's been a ship without a captain.

SUSE reaffirms support for Btrfs

Posted Aug 25, 2017 1:06 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

> sole developer decided to take something like two and a half months off to go backpacking doesn't exactly inspire a ton of confidence.

Would you rather have a developer that has no balance in his life and burns out and drops out of supporting the file system altogether when something else new and shiny comes along?

SUSE reaffirms support for Btrfs

Posted Aug 25, 2017 2:37 UTC (Fri) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

> Would you rather have a developer that has no balance in his life ... ?

I think what BillyBob would prefer is multiple core developers, so that one of them can take a few months off without stopping all support and progress on the project.

SUSE reaffirms support for Btrfs

Posted Aug 25, 2017 12:50 UTC (Fri) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link] (1 responses)

> While I don't disagree that bcachefs shows promise the fact that the project's sole developer decided to take something like two and a half months off to go backpacking doesn't exactly inspire a ton of confidence. It was only in the last 24 hours that the project's git repo has shown any sign of life since 2017-06-13.

Developing filesystems takes a long time. It's a marathon, not a sprint. Taking 2 months off is insignificant really, in terms of the time it takes for a filesystem to reach some sense of maturity, and is a much better idea than burning out. Especially if we are talking about one single developer.

> Also, bcachefs, while promising hasn't reached anything anywhere near feature parity with Btrfs.

Btrfs is already 10 years old. I couldn't quickly figure out how old bcachefs is but it would appear no more than a year or two? That's quite a time advantage, and Btrfs has enjoyed corporate sponsorship and multiple developers for much of that 10 years. It's way too early to try to compare them.

10 years, and some say still not ready for mainstream use.

SUSE reaffirms support for Btrfs

Posted Aug 27, 2017 5:58 UTC (Sun) by kmeyer (subscriber, #50720) [Link]

Bcachefs has been around for a couple years in some form or another. The original bcache was submitted to Linux in 2011: https://lwn.net/Articles/443938/ Bcachefs evolved out of that a few years later: https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/8/21/22

SUSE reaffirms support for Btrfs

Posted Aug 26, 2017 10:18 UTC (Sat) by bluss (guest, #47454) [Link]

Taking vacation during the summer is normal in many countries with high living standards, it is indeed a part of high living standards.