On 7/6/23 12:38 PM, Kent Overstreet wrote:
Right now what I'm hearing, in particular from Redhat, is that they want it upstream in order to commit more resources. Which, I know, is not what kernel people want to hear, but it's the chicken-and-the-egg situation I'm in.
I need to temper that a little. Folks in and around filesystems and storage at Red Hat find bcachefs to be quite compelling and interesting, and we've spent some resources in the past several months to investigate, test, benchmark, and even do some bugfixing.
Upstream acceptance is going to be a necessary condition for almost any distro to consider shipping or investing significantly in bcachefs. But it's not a given that once it's upstream we'll immediately commit more resources - I just wanted to clarify that.
It is a tough chicken and egg problem to be sure. That said, I think you're right Kent - landing it upstream will quite likely encourage more interest, users, and hopefully developers.
Maybe it'd be reasonable to mark bcachefs as EXPERIMENTAL or similar in Kconfig, documentation, and printks - it'd give us options in case it doesn't attract developers and Kent does get hit by a bus or decide to go start a goat farm instead (i.e. in the worst case, it could be yanked, having set expectations.)
-Eric
