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I mean, we could say the same thing about Kent - when he’s getting pissy, it’s about ensuring the filesystem is bulletproof and no one loses data.

Thing is, we’re not talking about getting pissy. We’re talking about getting downright insulting and borderline abusive. Linus got suspended from his own goddamn Kernel for his behavior. Let that sink in for a moment.

And I honestly believe that’s where part of the problem comes from. Kent looks up to Linus in a way, and sees himself as entitled to mimicking Linus’s bad behavior, which turns into a clusterfuck. Linux is still a good kernel despite Linus’s behavior, and bcachefs seems to be pretty good from a technical standpoint despite Kent’s behavior (even the kernel maintainers Kent pissed off admit it). They both shouldn’t be behaving that way, period. But both are very talented from a technical standpoint, which makes policing their behavior that much harder.

Ideally, yes, someone else would take over communication with Linus, but my hope isn’t particularly high at the moment. I wish Kent would calm down (further) and play by the rules more (even though he’s far from the only one who has broken those rules), and I wish Linus would learn to take it as much as he dishes it out.

And that makes it such a shame: bcachefs would be great to have in the kernel from a technical standpoint. It’s the personal conflicts that are really messing things up at the moment.

The point of these next gen file systems aren’t raw performance, they are reliability, performance for specific cases, and reduced data usage. For example:

• Copy on Write means it’s very performant to create snapshots

• incremental backups are much quicker

• checksumming means the filesystem directly and reliably detects data corruption

• built-in support for raid means a simplified setup and integration of scrubbing features into the filesystem, which can then take advantage of checksumming etc.

• deduplication can automatically recognize duplicated data and as such reduce data use

These are things that tend to reduce performance, not increase it. Which is why, when performance on these filesystems stays the same or even increases, that’s a major accomplishment.

It’s not quite as one sided as you put it, either. The most recent last minute feature was pushed for rc3, and wasn’t big filled. It was also a feature that enhanced stability, which is the reason Kent submitted it there. I’m not saying he’s right, but it’s important context here. And he’s far from the only one who has done this. Someone recently added new hardware support in rc7.

Also, he has improved somewhat. Arguably not as much as he should, but things aren’t as bad as they originally were.

And as to the attitude - he’s in good company, honestly. Especially in regard to Linus, them judging Kent is like a group of lepers judging a beauty contest. That’s the point this article makes very well.

None of this excuses his behaviour, but it is important to put it into context.

Ich möchte nicht wissen, wer ihn ersetzt. Bei dem aktuellen Druck von der Politik kann das nicht gut werden. Ich befürchte schon Mehdorn 2.0