The author lost corporate funding recently and is asking for donations. I just started giving 20/mo. I don't care about kernel drama; I just want a good COW filesystem for Linux and this guy is doing a thankless service.
> The author lost corporate funding recently and is asking for donations.
Just to be clear: This is apparently unrelated to the (not that unusual) not-yet-accepted PRs and their lkml review discussions.
From Overstreet's Patreon post:
"The company that's been funding bcachefs for the past 6 years has, unfortunately, been hit by a business downturn - they've been affected by the strikes in the media production industry. As such, I'm now having to look for new funding.
This came pretty unexpectedly, and puts us in a bit of a bind; with the addition of Hunter (who's already doing great work), I'm stretched thin, without much of a buffer."
Also note that this isn't Kent's first rodeo. bcache from the same author is an SSD-optimized block caching layer already in production in the Linux kernel. The idea is that bcache allows building of hybrid drives where the kernel has visibility and independent control over both the SSD(s) and the spinning rust drive(s).
My understanding is that at some point during development of bcache, Kent realized "hmm... if I just got rid of cache eviction and cleaned this up a bit, it would make a nice light-weight CoW SSD-optimized filesystem".
My understanding is that there are very few untried ideas in bcachefs, and it's a relatively low-risk project. Having been burned by over-enthusiastic early adoption of btrfs, I'm hoping bcachefs becomes a conservative alternative for distros that don't currently use a CoW filesystem as the default filesystem. (Okay, I did use rsync to weekly mirror to ext4, so maybe "burned" is too strong a word, but I did wedge btrfs a few times by over-filling it.)
https://www.patreon.com/join/bcachefs
You can do a smaller pledge via the custom pledge button if you want.