Kent Overstreet has released version 1.38.0 of the file system Bcachefs. This release includes two packages: bcachefs-kernel-dkms, which contains a kernel module built using the Dynamic Kernel Module Support (DKMS) system, and bcachefs-tools, which includes the bcachefs utility for user space operations such as creating (mkfs), mounting, restoring, and checking the file system. These packages are available for Debian and Ubuntu and are expected to be released for Arch Linux, Fedora, openSUSE, and NixOS. The DKMS module is compatible with Linux kernels starting from version 6.16.
The Bcachefs project aims to develop a file system that combines the advanced functionality of Btrfs and ZFS with the performance, reliability, and scalability of XFS. Bcachefs supports various features such as multiple devices in a partition, multi-layer drive layouts, replication (RAID 1/10), caching, transparent data compression, snapshots, integrity verification using checksums, error correction codes, and encrypted storage using ChaCha20 and Poly1305.
In this new release:
- The Btree structure need_discard has been optimized to track released sets of blocks more efficiently, which has eliminated deadlocks during restoration from the journal with insufficient free blocks for metadata.
- Logging operations have been enhanced by moving them to a separate fifo queue and increasing the maximum number of simultaneously performed journal writing operations to 256, improving performance for large storage with intensive write loads.
- Mounting large file systems with numerous snapshots