[hyperfekt]

I've taken a long look at COW filesystems in these past days as part of me wanting to set up a new workstation, and it appears that while btrfs is not a viable long-term solution for its quality issues and lack of development, ZFS does not have the pretense of being a filesystem for the general usecase, as exemplified by the lack of offline deduplication, defragmentation, the possibility to easily change disk configurations, and much more. Maybe we should consider accelerating the development of bcachefs as the future of reliable and feature-rich filesystems on Linux, which appears both more modern and holistic, but still has quite some ways to go. A new filesystem is necessary because many things we should demand from them are not modularly composable without massive disadvantages. Implementing compression as a layer, for example, demands basically creating another filesystem to manage the space, with great overhead in all dimensions. Similar things go for the consistency guarantees provided by COW or the deduplication and snapshotting that depends on it.