Bcachefs is an advanced filesystem for Linux, with an emphasis on reliability and robustness and the complete set of features one would expect from a modern filesystem.
It is intended to compete with the modern features of ZFS or Btrfs.
The bcachefs filesystem was merged into the Linux kernel, but due to friction between Linus Torvalds and Kent Overstreet concerning stability and developer conduct, it was ejected from the kernel in June 2025.
Key Features
- Copy on write (COW) – like zfs.
- Full data and metadata checksumming, for full data integrity: the filesystem should always detect (and where possible, recover from) damage; it should never return incorrect data.
- Multiple devices.
- Replication.
- Erasure coding (incomplete) High performance: doesn’t fragment your writes (like ZFS), no RAID hole.
- Caching, data placement.
- Compression via LZ4, gzip and Zstandard snapshots.
- Encryption using the ChaCha20 and Poly1305 algorithms.
- Snapshots.
- Nocow mode.
- Reflink.
- Extended attributes, ACLs, quotas.
- Petabyte scalability.
- Full online fsck, check and repair (in progress).
- Robustness and rock solid repair.
Website: bcachefs.org
Support:
Developer: Kent Overstreet
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
Bcachefs is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Journaling File Systems | |
|---|---|
| ext4 | Evolved from ext3 adding many notable features including extents |
| XFS | Designed to maintain high performance with large files and file systems |
| Btrfs | Checksumming Copy on Write File system |
| F2FS | Flash file system initially developed by Samsung Electronics |
| OpenZFS | Advanced file system and volume manager originally developed for Solaris |
| GFS2 | Shared disk file system for Linux computer clusters |
| ext3 | Default file system for many popular Linux distributions |
| JFS | Journaled File System |
| UBIFS | File system for raw flash memory used through UBI volumes |
| OCFS2 | Extent-based cluster file system |
| Bcachefs | Advanced file system ejected from the mainline kernel |
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