SOFTWARE<\/p>\n
More Rust, but more trouble with AI slop, too<\/p>\n
bcachefs boss Kent Overstreet has announced version 1.38.6 of the Linux filesystem, dubbing it \u201cthe performance release\u201d and declaring the project is no longer experimental.<\/p>\n
The new code<\/a>\u00a0is ostensibly a relatively modest point release, but is noteworthy as it\u2019s only the second release this year that project leader Kent Overstreet has described on his Patreon blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n His latest post reveals he\u00a0no longer considers the filesystem experimental. “Consider this the belated official announcement :)” he wrote, noting that he dropped the experimental tag some unspecified time ago.<\/p>\n Overstreet’s last blog post was a very brief mention of the release of version 1.37<\/a> back in mid-March, and this was rather overshadowed by his announcement soon afterwards that his AI coding assistant PoC was conscious \u2013 and female<\/a>. <\/p>\n Although the bcachefs Git repo<\/a> is sufficiently busy that it\u2019s hard to track progress, the repo for the accompanying bcachfs-tools<\/a> is much more readable. Starting with January\u2019s 1.35.0 it shows 18 releases so far this year. So, strictly speaking, the version number applies to the accompanying utilities rather than the filesystem module itself. However, a peek into the Debian APT repository<\/a> shows that kernel DKMS module has a matching version number, and neither the blog post about the release nor the changelog<\/a> distinguishes between them.<\/p>\n According to said changelog<\/a>, this version bumps the number of devices\u00a0in a filesystem to 255, and contains fixes for half a dozen bugs.<\/p>\n More significantly, it also identifies another six performance\u00a0optimizations.<\/p>\n The Reconcile operation \u2013 previously called \u201crebalance\u201d \u2013 is now faster and more parallel. Erasure coding (which Register sister site Blocks & Files explains<\/a>) is \u201cin use and seems to be working quite well\u201d. The post refers to the handbook, bcachefs Principles of Operation<\/a> [PDF], which has been updated since we last looked \u2013 the current revision is from April. There\u2019s also a handy Getting Started guide<\/a>.<\/p>\n Overstreet notes that all the major distributions he\u2019s checked now enable kernel Rust support, and he says that work has already started at converting the filesystem and tools into Rust:<\/p>\n “The bcachefs userspace code has already been converted to Rust, and that work has included safe Rust interfaces for the core btree iterator API and quite a bit of utility code. The next release will pull these bindings into the DKMS module, and we\u2019ll start to convert core code.”<\/p>\n That\u2019s a long-term project, though. In the Phoronix forums<\/a>, Overstreet explains a little more about the task. In one comment<\/a>, he says:<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know how long it\u2019ll take for it to be fully Rust – e.g.\u00a0converting the journal to safe Rust will be\u2026 interesting.<\/p>\n But it should be ~50% Rust this year, maybe in the next few months depending on how it goes with deploying a mixed C\/Rust DKMS module.<\/p>\n We were also pleasantly surprised to see him expressing considerable skepticism<\/a> towards AI-authored code contributions in the discussion:<\/p>\n I\u2019m definitely not against AIs, but I am starting to see the lazy patch submissions\/bug reports where someone clearly is just asking an LLM to do all the work, and that\u2019s not ok.<\/p>\n We find the performance comparisons in the Patreon post<\/a> interesting because in places they\u2019re slower than XFS\u2026<\/p>\n On the Epyc 9454 I\u2019ve been testing on, 48 Zen4 cores, 1.38.6 is pushing 16.5 GB\/sec through dbench 48 clients – vs.\u00a016 GB\/sec for XFS.<\/p>\n And later:<\/p>\n Testing 4k random writes with fio, bcachefs is now hitting 700k iops on this hardware, vs.\u00a01 million for XFS.<\/p>\n Overstreet explains that bcachefs is doing much more work here than XFS, but for us, these values feel more plausible simply because he\u2019s not claiming vastly superior results.<\/p>\n As an interesting\u00a0side-note, in the course of researching this article, we also discovered an experimental Linux NAS OS based around bcachefs, which rejoices in the name of NASty<\/a>. If you want to experiment with bcachefs without getting down and dirty and building the OS by hand, this could be a good way to do it.<\/p>\n We are still sad that the personality clash between Overstreet and Torvalds<\/a> resulted in bcachefs being\u00a0booted out of the Linux kernel<\/a>. However big its main developer\u2019s ego may be, bcachefs is a very promising project, and we hope that one day it may get merged again\u2026 Perhaps as the kernel\u2019s first filesystem implemented in Rust. \u00ae<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SOFTWARE More Rust, but more trouble with AI slop, too bcachefs boss Kent Overstreet has announced version 1.38.6…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":648303,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-648302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=648302"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648302\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/648303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=648302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=648302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=648302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}