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by ants_everywhere 658 days ago
Hey at least it's not the worst behavior we've seen from a Linux file system creator...

I thought Carl Thompson's response was very good and constructive: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/1816164937.417.1724473375169@ma...

What I don't understand is that IIUC Kent has his development git history well broken up into small tight commits. But he seems to be sending the Linux maintainers patches that are much larger than they want. I don't get why he doesn't take the feedback and work with them to send smaller patches.

EDIT: The culture at Google (where Kent used to work) was small patches, although that did vary by team. At Google you have fleet-wide control and can roll back changes that looked good in testing but worked out poorly in production. You can't do that across all organizations or people who have installed bcachefs. Carl pointed out that Kent seemed to be missing some social aspects, but I feel like he's also not fully appreciating the technical aspects behind why the process is the way it is.

3 comments

Honesty, I think I just presented that pull request badly.

I included the rcu_pending and vfs inode rhashtable conversion because I was getting user reports that it fixed issues that were seriously affecting system usability, and because they were algorithmically simple and well tested.

Back in the day, on multiple occasions Linus and others were rewriting core mm code in RC kernels; bcachefs is still experimental, so stuff like this should still be somewhat expected.

> bcachefs is still experimental, so stuff like this should still be somewhat expected.

I really think you need to realign your expectations here. The Linux kernel is in a different place now than "back in the day" and you are not Linus Torvalds.

That PR would have been better off had it been split into multiple ones and timed differently.

They Kent. I love your work and I have succesfully used bcachefs in my main workstation since 6.7. I also happily donate monthly in patreon, which I do rarely if ever.

Hope you don't get too much into trouble with Linus. I do not want to see you or the project get into the wrong side of the old guard...

I second this. Please keep pushing through and don't let the peanut gallery get to you. bcachefs is our only realistic chance to bring our filesystem game into the 21st century, given that the little hope we might have had in Oracle has not been realized.
Who's the "old guard" - Linus Torvalds?
Yeah I see where you're coming from. By the way, I only heard of bcachefs yesterday and I watched a great video where you were presenting about it. I'm excited about the file system and it's super cool to hear from you!
Likewise!
> Hey at least it's not the worst behavior we've seen from a Linux file system creator...

I think that dubious distinction would go to Hans Reiser.

It's not about the size of each individual patches but about the large amount of changes in total *during the freeze•.