Kent Overstreet, a developer of the Bcachefs filesystem, announced the transition to distributing 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.
Using DKMS for distribution will prevent the need to tie to each Linux kernel update and maintain Bcachefs in an up-to-date state, given the cessation of updates for Bcachefs in the main kernel. Builds are planned to be formed for the major Linux distributions. Since modules built through DKMS can be included in the initramfs, users will retain the ability to use Bcachefs for the root filesystem.
It is noted that Kent had discussions with the package maintainers for Debian and openSUSE distributions, who were planning to disable the kernel build with BCachefs support. The disabling was mainly related to concerns that BCachefs would no longer be supported, but they have now agreed to delay this action 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 insignificant bugs have surfaced in Bcachefs.
It is worth recalling that Bcachefs attempts to create a filesystem that combines the performance, reliability, and scalability of XFS with the advanced functionality found in Btrfs and ZFS. Bcachefs supports features such as including multiple devices in a partition, layered storage layouts (the lower layer with frequently used data from fast SSDs, and the upper layer with less frequently accessed data from hard drives), replication (RAID 1/10), caching, transparent data compression (using LZ4, gzip, and ZSTD modes), snapshots, integrity verification via checksums, the ability to store Reed-Solomon error correction codes (RAID 5/6), and encrypted storage (using ChaCha20 and Poly1305). In terms of performance, Bcachefs outperforms Btrfs and other Copy-on-Write based filesystems and demonstrates speeds comparable to Ext4 and XFS.
Forrás: opennet.ru
