Ahead of the stable Linux 6.17 kernel release expected in the coming hours, Bcachefs lead developer Kent Overstreet put out a blog post around the current multi-Linux distribution support for the out-of-tree DKMS packages for this copy-on-write file-system, some of their plans moving forward, and still aiming to graduate from the “experimental” phase at the end of the year.
While there is a lot of exciting features in Linux 6.17, with the mainline Linux 6.17 kernel the Bcachefs code remains in a frozen state. And for the foreseeable future the Bcachefs code will remain frozen in mainline following disagreements with the upstream kernel community.
Along with the recent Debian and Ubuntu packages of Bcachefs for easy user consumption, Kent Overstreet in today’s blog post outlined the support across different distributions. NixOS and Arch Linux are considered as having “first tier” Bcachefs support with their DKMS migration. That is followed by Debian and Ubuntu distributions. They are also adapting Fedora support via a COPR repository and a possible Bcachefs.org-hosted RPM repository in the future.
Kent also outlined his plans for pushing Bcachefs off the “experimental” phase around the end of the calendar year.
As for the release cadence for Bcachefs DKMS packages moving forward, Kent commented:
“The release channel – latest tagged release – has code that has been deemed stable. There is no fixed release cadence – bugfix releases are frequent, bigger features take longer to make their way from nightlies to release.”
More details on the Bcachefs DKMS happenings via this Patreon post.
