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I mean, we could say the same thing about Kent - when he’s getting pissy, it’s about ensuring the filesystem is bulletproof and no one loses data.

Thing is, we’re not talking about getting pissy. We’re talking about getting downright insulting and borderline abusive. Linus got suspended from his own goddamn Kernel for his behavior. Let that sink in for a moment.

And I honestly believe that’s where part of the problem comes from. Kent looks up to Linus in a way, and sees himself as entitled to mimicking Linus’s bad behavior, which turns into a clusterfuck. Linux is still a good kernel despite Linus’s behavior, and bcachefs seems to be pretty good from a technical standpoint despite Kent’s behavior (even the kernel maintainers Kent pissed off admit it). They both shouldn’t be behaving that way, period. But both are very talented from a technical standpoint, which makes policing their behavior that much harder.

Ideally, yes, someone else would take over communication with Linus, but my hope isn’t particularly high at the moment. I wish Kent would calm down (further) and play by the rules more (even though he’s far from the only one who has broken those rules), and I wish Linus would learn to take it as much as he dishes it out.

And that makes it such a shame: bcachefs would be great to have in the kernel from a technical standpoint. It’s the personal conflicts that are really messing things up at the moment.

The point of these next gen file systems aren’t raw performance, they are reliability, performance for specific cases, and reduced data usage. For example:

• Copy on Write means it’s very performant to create snapshots

• incremental backups are much quicker

• checksumming means the filesystem directly and reliably detects data corruption

• built-in support for raid means a simplified setup and integration of scrubbing features into the filesystem, which can then take advantage of checksumming etc.

• deduplication can automatically recognize duplicated data and as such reduce data use

These are things that tend to reduce performance, not increase it. Which is why, when performance on these filesystems stays the same or even increases, that’s a major accomplishment.

It’s not quite as one sided as you put it, either. The most recent last minute feature was pushed for rc3, and wasn’t big filled. It was also a feature that enhanced stability, which is the reason Kent submitted it there. I’m not saying he’s right, but it’s important context here. And he’s far from the only one who has done this. Someone recently added new hardware support in rc7.

Also, he has improved somewhat. Arguably not as much as he should, but things aren’t as bad as they originally were.

And as to the attitude - he’s in good company, honestly. Especially in regard to Linus, them judging Kent is like a group of lepers judging a beauty contest. That’s the point this article makes very well.

None of this excuses his behaviour, but it is important to put it into context.

Ob Döner oder Drehspieß hat nur mit dem Fleischanteil zu tun. Hähnchendöner darf es nach wie vor geben. Also zumindest theoretisch machen sie da nichts falsch solange der Fleischanteil hoch genug ist.

Ich möchte nicht wissen, wer ihn ersetzt. Bei dem aktuellen Druck von der Politik kann das nicht gut werden. Ich befürchte schon Mehdorn 2.0

Good to know… Although hitting enter twice or adding two spaces makes me feel like a boomer. Oh well

OK, weird, I had them in there, but I added a second newline per paragraph and it seems to look better now.

I might not have everything, but here’s the best summary I can put together:

This back and forth has been going on for a while now. The main complaints more recently have been the timing of his pull requests, and just generally his attitude and cooperation with others. The most recent spat was because he submitted a feature in the rc3 merge window, whereas you’re only supposed to submit Bugfixes in that time frame. The feature in question was a journal rewind function, which would essentially move the filesystem back in time, which could fix an issue that did crop up in the testing phase. As such, he saw it as a workaround to fix an issue that had arisen, and so despite it technically being a feature, he saw it in the category of Bugfixes. The caused major disagreements as well as the way he talked with others. And now his pull request for rc1 has been simply ignored by Linus.

The point where Kent is coming from is that he wants a rock solid file system, and he’s following a bit of a take no prisoners approach to reach that goal. He seems to get most of his income from his following on Patreon, and so his focus is squarely on the users. With that focus, he seems to lose sight of other things, especially the cooperation with others in the kernel team. In fact, a number of people he has sparred with have shown decent respect for his code recently, saying the problem is really the cooperative aspect. One of the main reasons for bcachefs is also the lack of a proper CoW-filesystem in the Linux kernel that doesn’t have the kinds of problems that btrfs has. And the fact that he states this and also talks about the lessons he’s learnt from btrfs’s shortcomings rubs a number of people the wrong way.

Now here’s some stuff I read into this personally: I have the impression that Kent looks up to Linus in a way. And they’re actually both kind of similar: they both are extremely talented engineers, they both saw something missing in the software landscape and said “fuck it, I’ll make it myself”, and they both can be pretty serious dicks. I mean Linus managed to get suspended from his own damn project for being a dick - now that’s an achievement. He’s older now and somewhat calmer, but even recently he had quite the outburst on the mailing list. And I get the impression I get is that Kent (probably subconsciously?) has an attitude of “if he can do it, so can I”. Which would be fair (even though it is poisonous), the only problem being Linus having the longer lever.

Then there’s the aspect of his mental health. He has said multiple times that his mental health has been suffering, which honestly doesn’t surprise me. And if you look at his responses in different places, there seems to be quite an up and down. In some cases, he’s very respectful to Linus, and in some cases he’s pretty nasty (yes, Linus level nasty, but still). As far as I can tell, he needs a break and therapy. The only problem being, bcachefs has quite the momentum currently, and it wouldn’t exactly be great for the project to lose that momentum, either. (Mind you, probably still better than being kicked from the kernel)