What is the difference between btrfs and bcachefs

The Water Cooler
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https://bcachefs.org/
https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

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Is this a question or a statement? :crazy_face:

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Just a small question?

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I think the links you posted give a good overview of each product. The only thing I could think to add would be that bcachefs is relatively new, and still probably has quite a few issues to resolve before it is production ready.

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But what is the main difference.

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Right now BcacheFS is experimental: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Bcachefs-Fixes-Linux-6.9-rc4

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Yes i know but i just wanted to know the key differences between this 2 as this is not clear from there website why will someone use that instead of btrfs if it is faster than why not contribute to btrfs and help to make it faster… There mustbe something extra that i can’t find out. This is totally out of curiosity if that can be helped.

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Got it. BcacheFS is suppose to be faster and more reliable when it is out of it’s experimental phase. Whether or not that will be true is yet to be determined. The main reason for bcachefs IMO is the quote: " The COW filesystem for Linux that won’t eat your data", which is a direct reference to btrfs and it’s development history. btrfs has gotten better in the past years, but many people still don’t like it because of their experiences with it.

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I mean, they are totally different filesystems. What is the difference between ext4 and xfs or exfat and vfat? They are lots of differences, they are completely different filesystems.

I would only say this. bcachefs is very new so it’s stability isn’t proven and shouldn’t be expected until it is more widely used. Also due to it’s newness, it’s userspace tools are incredibly immature at this point.

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Correct, it’s still considered experimental by the developer.

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The feature lists are quite similar. Both use B-trees, can span multi-volumes, support subvolumes and snapshots, support CoW, compression, certain RAID-like features, checksums. One difference is that bcachefs supports encryption while btrfs has promised encryption for years.
I ran some bonnie++ tests last week and btrfs performed dramatically better than bcachefs on
the 6.8.4-300.fc40.x86_64 kernel.
I hope that bcachefs will evolve into a stable & high performance fs, but that a long way off.

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