The Bcachefs project has just released version 1.33 as the “biggest new feature in the past ~2 years” for this modern copy‑on‑write Linux filesystem that supports encryption, snapshots, compression, and more, offering advanced features aimed at rivalling filesystems like Btrfs or ZFS.
The new version brings a major new “reconcile” engine that unifies data and metadata handling, automates replication and recovery, and substantially improves performance, logging, and error reporting under heavy load. But before we get to what’s new in this version, let’s quickly revisit the background.
As we informed you earlier, Bcachefs is undergoing a big transition in how it’s distributed and maintained upstream. In mid-2025, Linus Torvalds dropped Bcachefs from the official Linux kernel 6.17 merge window after a public dispute with lead developer Kent Overstreet.
Cool. Probably still not using it. If I want to run an out-of-tree COW filesystem, I might as well be using ZFS - stable and with less drama.
This was my entire hope for bcachefs. It wanted a better in-tree fs. As soon as Overstreet started his tantrums my hopes died.
