Hacker News Reader

Comment by lukaslalinsky | Hacker News Reader

I've been using ZFS on my Linux servers for years and have pretty good experience with it. I've not been following Linux development too much. Is bcachefs usable/stable/reliable enough to replace it?

View on HN

It's not as battle-tested like ZFS with 15+ years of field usage, but it's good enough for me and other users.

There's a NAS appliance called NASty and it shares publicly usage stats: https://nasty-telemetry.pages.dev/ Those numbers are NASty alone. There are more users on other systems.

15+ years of ZFS code is also often said as being a nearly unmanageable pile of mess, supposedly to the point that there’s some of the code that maintainers are afraid of touching, and with plenty of unresolved weird bugs (which I experienced myself with data loss).

Sometimes starting fresh with one coherent codebase and all features design baked in from the start might be better.

It takes 10+ years for any storage engine to iron out all the wrinkles, get it to a state where it's both fast enough, and you can trust it to not lose data. It's stupid to throw it away once it reaches that point.

It's not stupid if the 10+ years code is unmaintainable. Why did you ignore that part?

People keep saying it takes 10 years, but that presupposes methods that never improve. Why would we keep doing the same thing over and over again? Wouldn't be much point in that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com