With Bcachefs now being “externally maintained” with the upstream kernel not accepting any further feature changes for now to this copy-on-write file-system, Bcachefs is pursuing a nice DKMS experience for distributing updated file-system kernel driver support out-of-tree. Convenient DKMS Debian packages of Bcachefs are now available on Ubuntu and Debian Linux platforms.
Bcachefs lead developer Kent Overstreet is now maintaining Debian packages providing Bcachefs DKMS (Dynamic Kernel Module Support) packages for recent Ubuntu and Debian releases. Thus with simply adding the new repository it’s easy to install the updated Bcachefs kernel module and enjoy that support moving forward rather than relying on the frozen upstream state.
In addition to the bcachefs-kernel-dkms packages for the kernel driver, the archive also hosts the latest bcachefs-tools for the user-space programs.
The archive and setup instructions for these new DKMS packages are available via apt.bcachefs.org. Now having blessed packages out there for providing the recommended path of updated Bcachefs file-system support, I will be working on some benchmarks of these packages shortly.