Linux Kernel 6.17 Drops bcachefs

Jun 30, 2025

After a clash over some late fixes and disagreements between bcachefs's lead developer and Linus Torvalds, bachefs is out.

Last year, Linus Torvalds openly admitted his regret to ever allowing bcachefs support to be added to the Linux kernel, when he stated the following in a response to the bcachefs pull request: “Yeah, no, enough is enough. The last pull was already big. This is too big, it touches non-bcachefs stuff, and it's not even remotely some kind of regression. At some point, ‘fix something’ just turns into development, and this is that point.”

Torvalds continued, “Nobody sane uses bcachefs and expects it to be stable, so every single user is an experimental site.” He went on to say “The bcachefs patches have become these kinds of ‘lots of development during the release cycles rather than before it’, to the point where I'm starting to regret merging bcachefs.” He concluded with, “This is getting beyond ridiculous.”

The clash continued to be heated. Because of Torvalds’s strict release cycle, the Linux creator decided (after the lead bcachefs developer submitted large changes for the new <I>journal_rewind<I> feature) that he’d had enough.

In the end, Torvalds pulled support for Bcachefs for the 6.16-rc3 kernel release and notified the developer that it wouldn’t be included in the 6.17 merge window.

In another communication on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, Torvalds put the final kibosh on the situation when he stated “Honestly, at that point, I don't really feel comfortable being involved at all, and the only thing we both seemed to really fundamentally agree on in that discussion was ‘we're done’.”
 
 

 
 
 

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