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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Linus Torvalds Begins Expressing Regrets Merging Bcachefs (www.phoronix.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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There's been some Friday night kernel drama on the Linux kernel mailing list... Linus Torvalds has expressed regrets for merging the Bcachefs file-system and an ensuing back-and-forth between the file-system maintainer.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I wouldn't say, "repairing XFS is much easier." Yeah, fsck -y with XFS is really all you have to do 99% of the time but also you're much more likely to get corrupted stuff when you're in that situation compared to say, btrfs which supports snapshotting and redundancy.

Another problem with XFS is its lack of flexibility. By that I don't mean, "you can configure it across any number of partitions on-the-fly in any number of (extreme) ways" (like you can with btrfs and zfs). I mean it doesn't have very many options as to how it should deal with things like inodes (e.g. tail allocation). You can increase the total amount of space allowed for inode allocation but only when you create the filesystem and even then it has a (kind of absurdly) limited number that would surprise most folks here.

As an example, with an XFS filesystem, in order to store 2 billion symlimks (each one takes an inode) you would need 1TiB of storage just for the inodes. Contrast that with something like btrfs with max_inline set to 2048 (the default) and 2 billion symlimks will take up a little less than 1GB (assuming a simplistic setup on at least a 50GB single partition).

Learn more about btrfs inlining: https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Inline-files.html