For those who haven't kept up with bcache, the bcache codebase has been
evolving/metastasizing into a full blown, general purpose posix filesystem - a
modern COW filesystem with checksumming, compression, multiple devices, caching,
and eventually snapshots and all kinds of other nifty features.
"Yet another new filesystem? Why?"
Well, years ago (going back to when I was still at Google), I and the other
people working on bcache realized that what we were working on was, almost by
accident, a good chunk of the functionality of a full blown filesystem - and
there was a really clean and elegant design to be had there if we took it and
ran with it. And a fast one - the main goal of bcachefs to match ext4 and xfs on
performance and reliability, but with the features of btrfs/zfs.
It's taken a long time to get to this point - longer than I would have guessed
if you'd asked me back when we first started talking about it - but I'm pretty
damn proud of where it's at now.
