Re: Is bcache dead?
From: Rolf Fokkens <hidden>
Date: 2014-11-06 22:20:38
Another happy user experience: I started packaging bcache-tools for Fedora 20 summer 2013, just because I wanted to use bcache. After alligning bcache-tools with util-linux, Dracut and LVM2 (all these packages needed minor tweaks, that were all integrated upstream) I have been using bcache myself (of course). I've been living on the edge by using writeback caching and a cheap SSD, and it has all been working like a charm! Well, I've been living over the edge actually by attempting to enable TRIM - I blame the resulting corruptions on the cheap SSD. And I had occasional "bcache_writeback 100% CPU" issues, but those seem to be gone (currently kernel 3.16). And searching for bcache at bugzilla.redhat.com: no bugs pop up. Could be that there are no bcache users at all, but I know for fact that that's not true. So (when not using TRIM): excellent performance and stability. Thanks for the good work! Rolf On 11/06/2014 04:03 PM, Zachary Palmer wrote:
If I can throw mine in as well, I've been running bcache on my Debian Wheezy laptop for around a year now. (I'm using the Debian backports 3.12 kernel.) When I first moved to bcache, I noticed that certain operations -- interacting with Git repositories and building LaTeX documents, for instance -- became much snappier. I'm using a feeble little 32GB SSD that came with the laptop to cache a 1TB drive and I'm even using writethrough caching (more out of paranoia about the quality of my cheap little SSD than anything else), but it makes a difference. Since then, it has been quietly humming along and I've stopped paying attention to it. And that's the beauty of a good tool like this: I can stop paying attention to it. I've enjoyed a year of better I/O and, other than in the initial setup, I haven't paid anything in maintenance burden: no instability, no hiccups, no unexplained hangs. So for my part as an end user just trying to get a little edge out of my laptop hardware, thank you! I expect I'm speaking on behalf of quite a few people when I say that you've made things better in a subtle but significant way. :) Cheers, Zach