Bcachefs Preparing For New Features In Linux 6.11

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Storage on 31 May 2024 at 06:37 AM EDT. 15 Comments

Bcachefs lead developer Kent Overstreet sent in a batch of file-system fixes on Thursday for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel. In that pull request he teased features that are set to arrive with the Linux 6.11 kernel later in the summer.

All eyes are on Linux 6.11 with Bcachefs looking to land its big disk accounting rewrite and accounting for unstriped data within stripe buckets. Kent Overstreet explained of this forthcoming prominent work to Bcachefs:

"important note for users: BCH_DATA_unstriped (accounting for unstriped data in stripe buckets) is arriving next merge window (which requires regenerating alloc info on mount if erasure coding is enabled), and the disk accounting rewrite (at long last!) is also in my master branch and arriving next merge window - which requires regenerating alloc info for everyone.

disk accounting rewrite brings per-snapshot-id accounting, per-btree accounting, accounting for pending rebalance work, compression type/ratio accounting.

everything should be in place to make this a smooth upgrade progress, except for getting a progress indicator plumbed through so users aren't left wondering "why is my mount so slow? is it hung?" which we're going to try to do as well."

While exciting work to look forward to, for Linux 6.10 the pull request this week brings some downgrade fixes, snapshot deletion and repair fixes, improving error messages, some code reorganization, and other fixes. This builds on the Bcachefs Linux 6.10 merge window changes that included prepping for online fsck support and other feature work.