Of the ~2 years that bcachefs has been in, a good chunk of that has been scalabilitiy and feature work, as we hit wider deployment and started finding out more about what was needed in actual usage. That's largely done, we don't need any more major development before lifting experimental (there are some smaller things, like subvolume walking APIs, but nothing like the disk accounting rewrite or all the backpointers scalability work). That's why rate of patches has been going up, now we're down to just fixing user bugs. > Bcachefs has very nice unit and integration testing with ktest, but it > isn't enough to represent real-world usage yet and that's why I think > some features should still be marked just as experimental as erasure > coding. Bcachefs filesystem where I do not use reflink, snapshot or > anything wild, only multiple devices with foreground/promote_target, > replication, compression, never experience weird issues or lockups for > many kernel versions now. Mind you, I'm not using bcachefs on any > rootfs yet, only specific use-case and patterns that can be > documented. Better automated testing would _always_ be nice :) But realistically there's always going to be only so much we can do with automated testing, there's always going to be things that only show up in the wild when users start coming up with crazy usage scenarios and doing all sorts of wild and wonderful things to break it. There's no substitute for real world battle testing, and lots of it. So the big thing on my mind right now isn't improving the automated testing (besides, the server bill is already $1.5k/month and I run those machines hard) - it's improving all the debugging tools to make sure we can quickly and easy debug anything that might happen in the wild. Later on, I hope we do add more automated testing - especially fault inejection. _Lots_ of fault injection. > One more thing that I think is missing, many patches submitted, even > if it doesn't show up, should have a Reported-By and Tested-By tag to > help show how many people in the community are working and helping > make Bcachefs great, it would also make people on the ML aware that > patches aren't just thrown in there; it usually has been a reported > bug from a community member which had to test the resulting patch. Yeah, for sure. You guys have been keeping be busy lately, so when I'm debugging sunup to sundown for multiple people (a lot of days, literalyl!) things do get lost :) But I will do more of that.
