Kent Overstreet has released Bcachefs 1.37, a modern copy-on-write Linux filesystem that supports encryption, snapshots, compression, and other advanced features designed to compete with filesystems such as Btrfs and ZFS.
One of the most notable changes is that erasure coding is no longer experimental, with its core functionality now complete. The feature is integrated with the filesystem’s reconcile process, enabling automatic repair of degraded data and support for tiered and mixed-device setups. However, further improvements to stripe allocation are still planned for a future release.
Recovery and data integrity have also been significantly improved. Journal rewind is now fully safe, with the filesystem tracking safe rollback points. The process is transactionally consistent, ensuring safe resumption even after a crash during a rewind.
Additionally, a new targeted recovery mechanism now checks recently written data after an unclean shutdown and attempts immediate repair if corruption is found. If recovery is not possible, the filesystem automatically rewinds to the last known good state within a defined time window.
This release also enhances resilience to hardware issues. In light of this, Bcachefs can now automatically recover from devices with faulty flush or FUA support, reducing the risk of silent data corruption. Recovery from unclean shutdowns is now faster and more predictable.
Bcachefs 1.37 also adds several new tooling features. Users can now list subvolumes with filtering and sorting, explore snapshot hierarchies with disk usage details, and propagate file I/O options across reflinked data while maintaining ownership constraints. The fs top command now includes a terminal user interface with per-device statistics, and tabular outputs have improved alignment for better readability.
Finally, this version expands compatibility by adding support for Linux kernel 7.0. Development is also shifting toward Rust, with the userspace component now fully converted.
For more details, see the changelog.
Currently, Bcachefs tooling is officially packaged in a limited number of distributions, including Arch Linux, Gentoo, Void, and Fedora. Debian and Ubuntu do not include Bcachefs in their repositories, but users can add support through the external upstream APT repository at apt.bcachefs.org.
openSUSE provides Bcachefs through its Build Service, while NixOS includes only the userspace tools. Since Bcachefs is no longer part of the mainline kernel, all distributions rely on an out-of-tree module, typically DKMS, to enable filesystem support. Module availability may vary between systems.
