Linus Torvalds Announces First Linux Kernel 6.7 Release Candidate

petsoi@discuss.tchncs.de to Linux@lemmy.ml – 233 points –
Linus Torvalds Announces First Linux Kernel 6.7 Release Candidate - 9to5Linux
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Yes! I'm eagarly waiting for bcachefs to land.

As a Linux noob I first thought you were just facerolling on your keyboard. But then I read it as b-cache-fs. It's a new file system, I take it?

Exactly! It is a new Btrfs competitor and OpenZFS alternative that is built upon the bcache codebase.

Any more info for a geek without too much time?

Features include caching,[4] full file-system encryption using the ChaCha20 and Poly1305 algorithms,[5] native compression[4] via LZ4, gzip[6] and Zstandard,[7] snapshots,[4] CRC-32C and 64-bit checksumming.[3] It can span block devices, including in RAID configurations.

The main takeaway from the article is that the developer's name is Kent Overstreet, who beat his bitter rival Surrey Underpath, who are both canonically related to famed developer Cornwall Midroad.

As someone else said, it's similar to btrfs. bcachefs has a lot of functional overlap with btrfs, which is great. There have also been a few benchmarks showing that bcachesfs is faster for some situations (cold-cache warming, IIRC). One of the big advantages over btrfs is that bcachefs's RAID is more robust - several of btrfs's RAID levels have been marked as experimental and prone to data loss, for years. There's been improvement in btrfs RAID lately; the skeptic in me believes this is directly a result of pressure from bcachefs, which is in a position to become a favored fs in Linux.

And I'm waiting until bcachefs has sufficiently spread so I can see whether it really works or not.