So with the recent drama it looks like bcachefs isn’t going to stay in the kernel for too long. What do I do now? I have my root filesystem as bcachefs on multiple devices. Is it possible to migrate to btrfs or ext4?
There’s no need to jump into conclusions when it’s too early to tell.
If later, it so happens it gets removed, and you don’t want use out of tree stuff, which is still possible through several means, including building your own linux (your own kernel), then you can back all contents of your partitions up, create new partitions with the FS of your preference (ext4, btrfs, whatever), and finally copying over the contents of that last backup. No need to stress out this early, :)
Is bcachefs that good as the dev is saying to justify their bad behavior?
It’s a temporary thing and it’s likly Kent will just spend the time too continue development and prepare patches for next cycle instead. The ambition is to take it out of Experimental status sometime in the next year so there’s at least motivation to figure out these things. During the delay testers of this FS can still submit bug reports.
LTS Kernels are not affected, aren’t they? I also wonder if some distributions will patch in bcachefs support for non LTS.
Currently, there’s no serious discussion about removal from mainline. And LTS won’t remove it.
Should it happen, you can still use Kent’s kernel tree as before. Whether distributions ship it - who knows.
If there’s no mainline or dkms support, I’ll move my storage away from it in favor of btrfs that I’ve successfully used the years before instead of switching to LTS. Just because of future maintainability and migration options.
Don’t have a knee-jerk reaction to every news post that you see. We have yet to see what will happen and you will have loads of time to decide on what to do when we do know if it will get pulled. You will be able to use your current kernel version with it for as long as you need to even if it does get pulled from the next version. So I would wait and see what actually happens.
Best option is likely a reinstall of your OS to move off it though there are other more involved ways like copying your rootfs off, reformatting and copying it back before reinstalling your bootloader. A reinstall is likely going to be quicker though.
