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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • His job is to not get the maintainers to agree, but his job definitely is to bark a bit if somebody behaves like Ted.

    It might even be Rust is not meant for Linux kernel and it will never happen. Or it happens in the driver layers, but stays out from the core. We do not know yet. The concern Ted is raising is definitely valid: if the C APIs change, people who work daily in the C code cannot spent cycles fixing the Rust APIs. These people have their day jobs which pays them to maintain these subsystems, and it is at least not yet clear will these employers fund rewriting anything in Rust. There are tens of filesystems in Linux, with lifetimes passing around that are not documented and might not work in Rust.

    Note: I’m a Rust dev for the past 10 years, and I follow this discussion with high interest.






  • Me neither, but the risk is there and well documented.

    The point was, ZFS is not great as your normal laptop/workstation filesystem. It kind of requires a certain setup, can be slow in certain kinds of workflows, expects disks of same size and is never available immediately for the latest kernel version. Nowadays you actually can add more disks to a pool, but for a very long time you needed to build a new one. Adding a larger disk to a pool will still not resize it, untill all the disks are replaced.

    It shines with steady and stable raid arrays, which are designed to a certain size and never touched after they are built. I would never use it in my workstation, and this is the point where bcachefs gets interesting.


  • But scrub is not fsck. It just goes through the checksums and corrects if needed. That’s why you need ECC ram so the checksums are always correct. If you get any other issues with the fs, like a power off when syncing a raidz2, there is a chance of an error that scrub cannot fix. Fsck does many other things to fix a filesystem…

    So basically a typical zfs installation is with UPS, and I would avoid using it on my laptop just because it kind of needs ECC ram and you should always unmount it cleanly.

    This is the spot where bcachefs comes into place. It will implement whatever we love about zfs, but also be kind of feasible for mobile devices. And its fsck is pretty good already, it even gets online checks in 6.11.

    Don’t get me wrong, my NAS has and will have zfs because it just works and I don’t usually need to touch it. The NAS sits next to UPS…