The process of Linux kernel development is prone to arguments, strong opinions, and the occasional dramatic standoff. Despite that, development has progressed steadily over the decades, driven by a diverse community of contributors who are as passionate as they are principled.
And every once in a while, one of these internal debates spills into public view. This time, it's Bcachefs, the COW filesystem that pitches itself as a filesystem that "doesn't eat your data".
No More Bcachefs in Linux?
Linus is not happy.
With the upcoming Linux kernel 6.17 release, Linus Torvalds has decided to drop Bcachefs support, owing to growing tensions between himself and Bcachefs maintainer Kent Overstreet. The decision follows a series of disagreements over how fixes and changes for it were submitted during the 6.16 release cycle.
Friction between them isn’t new. Late last year, Kent was called out for an offensive reply to Linux memory management (MM) developer, Michal Hocko, and this just seems like a conclusion to everything that’s happened since.
You see, recently, Kent filed a pull request to add a new feature called "journal-rewind" It was meant to improve bcachefs repair functionality, but it landed during the release candidate (RC) phase, a time usually reserved for bug fixes, not new features, as Linus pointed out.
Theodore Ts'o, a long-time kernel developer and maintainer of ext4, also chimed in, saying that Kent’s approach risks introducing regressions, especially when changes affect sensitive parts of a filesystem like journaling. He reminded Kent that the rules around the merge window have been a long-standing consensus in the kernel community, and it’s Linus’s job to enforce them.
After some more back and forth, Kent pushed back, arguing that the rules around the merge window aren’t absolute and should allow for flexibility, even more so when user data is at stake.
He then went ahead and resubmitted the patch, citing instances from XFS and Btrfs where similar fixes made it into the kernel during RCs. Linus merged it into his tree, but ultimately decided to drop Bcachefs entirely in the 6.17 merge window.
To which Kent responded by clarifying that he wasn’t trying to shut Linus out of Bcachefs' decisions, stressing that he values Linus’s input, and saying:
I don't want to be in that position.
I'm just not going to have any sense of humour where user data integrity is concerned or making sure users have the bugfixes they need.
Like I said - all I've been wanting is for you to tone it down and stop holding pull requests over my head as THE place to have that discussion.
You have genuinely good ideas, and you're bloody sharp. It is FUN getting shit done with you when we're not battling.
But you have to understand the constraints people are under. Not just myself.
Currently, the matter seems to have reached its conclusion. But given the ever-changing nature of kernel development, there's always a chance that perspectives could shift. That said, I wouldn't hold my breath.
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