Kent Overstreet, the developer of the Bcachefs filesystem, announced a transition to the distribution of Bcachefs using DKMS (Dynamic Kernel Module Support), where the module is provided in source code and compiled on the user's system immediately after the package installation. After a Linux kernel update, the module is automatically rebuilt in the system.
Distribution using DKMS will allow it to be independent of each Linux kernel update and keep the Bcachefs implementation up-to-date, especially considering the cessation of updates for Bcachefs in the mainline kernel. Builds are planned for major Linux distributions. Since modules compiled via DKMS can be included in the initramfs, users will retain the ability to use Bcachefs for the root filesystem.
It is noted that Kent spoke with the maintainers of kernel packages in the Debian and openSUSE distributions, who were planning to disable the kernel build with Bcachefs support. The disconnection was mainly due to concerns that Bcachefs would no longer be supported, but they have now agreed to delay the disconnection until the DKMS-based Bcachefs packages are ready. Additionally, the project is close to removing the experimental filesystem status — since the release of kernel 6.16, only minor bugs have affected Bcachefs.
It is worth noting that Bcachefs attempts to create a filesystem that combines the performance, reliability, and scalability of XFS with the extended functionality found in Btrfs and ZFS. Bcachefs supports features such as multi-device pooling, layered storage configurations (with the lower layer containing frequently accessed data on fast SSDs and the upper layer with less demanded data from hard drives), replication (RAID 1/10), caching, transparent data compression (LZ4, gzip, and ZSTD modes), snapshots, integrity verification via checksums, the capability to store Reed-Solomon error correction codes (RAID 5/6), and storing information in encrypted form (using ChaCha20 and Poly1305). In terms of performance, Bcachefs surpasses Btrfs and other copy-on-write based filesystems, demonstrating speeds comparable to Ext4 and XFS.
Source: opennet.ru
