Linux 6.18 Will Further Complicate Non-GPL Out-of-Tree File-Systems

7 xenophonf 3 9/12/2025, 11:44:16 AM phoronix.com ↗

Comments (3)

dmm · 2h ago
I've been following bachefs development for a while and supporting Kent on patreon so Bcachefs losing its mainline, supported status broke my heart a little. My home storage has always been under ZFS but being out-of-tree and requiring old kernels is increasingly annoying for me. It's basically the only reason I still use Debian, all my other systems are Fedora at this point.

Also, I hit one of the zfs native encryption send/receive bugs after it came out. It was clearly a rushed feature and made me question the future of zfs maintenance.

My plans have now changed to btrfs and I'm taking the opportunity to create a rock-solid and thoroughly tested backup/restore strategy. Wish me luck!

xenophonf · 46m ago
I've long been a ZFS stan, but I am slowing coming around to the idea that I probably won't be able to continue using it at even the small scales I have planned. It's a damned shame.
evanjrowley · 3h ago
What will the reaction be from Canonical, iXsystems, NixOS, and Proxmox? I choose my Linux platforms based on their support for OpenZFS. Everything else at the moment is just a disadvantaged compromise.

The outlooks seems bleak because of 1) last week's news of a potential successor, Bcachefs, moving to being externally maintained; 2) one of the Btrfs maintainers stepping down.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Bcachefs-Externally-Maintained

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Josef-Bacik-Leaves-Meta