this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2025
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“Major stability problems”. Hilarious. Get one person that actually uses bcachefs to confirm that. Good luck.
Kent has stability problems and drives me crazy but that is a baseless hit piece. Bcachefs is a solid fs.
Linus has not pushed back on the quality of bcachefs other than to say it is too unproven to rely on (too new). What Linus objected to was the process violations and the attitude of the lead developer.
Given how much Linus and the other LKML devs wanted to get rid of Kent, the fact that it took so long to dump him tells us that they really wanted to keep bcachefs (the technology).
There may have been more data loss bugs in btrfs and even OpenZFS than bcachefs since it was added to the kernel. I have many bcachefs systems. I have one btrfs system. Guess which one has caused me problems.
Fair enough on "major". Edited that. But it has stability issues that aren't handled well enough for RCs, so it's not a hit piece to state that fact. Those stability issues may come from it being new, but it's still an issue. Saying it's because they want to "get rid of Kent" is just as much of a hit piece, too.
The dev is unstable. And he made the kernel process chaotic. But the filesystem itself is pretty solid. Do you have a link to stability issues?
My understanding is the stability risks come from active development additions vs "fixes" during that stage of the development cycle.
https://linuxiac.com/torvalds-expresses-regret-over-merging-bcachefs-into-kernel/
...
YMMV, but my production systems will stick with ZFS since it's kernel release updates are clear when there are "upgrades" vs "updates", as you do those manually when it alerts you.
"Stable" in this context doesnt mean "your PC will definately crash and you will lose data!", bcachefs is well past that. It means that the development is too active to be considered production ready since the code changes are too large to confirm the scary bit won't happen (as much as can be).
Even JC threw in the towel on
bcachefs-toolsdue to this: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-Orphans-Bcachefs-ToolsYou certainly don’t have to use bcachefs. I love it but several of my systems will come off it Joe that it is out of the kernel. But not for technical reasons.
It is not that he changes were scary. Nobody had a problem with the changes. It was entirely process. It was “when” the changes were being submitted.
Kent always sent stuff in after the merge window. And when Linus rejected them, due to timing, Jent would throw a massive fit and start insulting everybody. Ironically he would complain about having to put up with “drama” from Linus.
So, Linus kicked him out.
Nothing to do with the code.