Hello, and welcome to today’s quick tech update. In the world of Linux filesystems, BcacheFS has stirred up quite a controversy. As Hackaday reports, BcacheFS—developed by Kent Overstreet and merged into the Linux kernel in early 2024—promised modern copy-on-write performance much like ZFS and btrfs. But according to SavvyNik’s latest coverage, users are encountering frequent data corruption bugs, and patches are flying in so fast that Linus Torvalds himself “expressed regret for merging BcacheFS into mainline Linux.”

Overstreet has advised everyone running into issues to “upgrade to the latest Linux kernel to get critical fixes,” underlining the rough state of affairs. Hackaday bluntly calls it “at best an experimental Alpha-level filesystem implementation and should probably not be used with important data or systems.”

So if you need a reliable COW filesystem today, stick with tried-and-true options like btrfs or ZFS. And remember: always keep multiple backups, test them regularly, and think twice before deploying bleeding-edge tech on production systems.
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