Linux 7.0 is approaching and there is a new model of bcachefs to go along with it… in addition to inexperienced shoots of help for Apple’s new disk format.

Fascinating developments are taking place in Linux filesystem land, with a brand new model of the bcachefs filesystem – and a Linux distro providing help for Apple’s APFS disk format.

A brand new model of the next-generation copy-on-write snapshotting GPL filesystem for Linux is out: bcachefs 1.37.0 appeared simply yesterday as we write.

This launch contains help for the forthcoming Linux kernel 7.0. It’s anticipated subsequent month – the most recent launch candidate, 7.0-rc4, appeared the identical day as the brand new bcachefs launch. As we reported last year, bcachefs is now being developed exterior of the Linux kernel once more, however it may be loaded as a DKMS module.

This launch has improved erasure coding, quicker restoration from unsafe shutdowns, multi-device filesystems are faster, and extra.

The notes within the Git commit point out a brand new model of the bcachefs handbook, which creator Kent Overstreet calls its Principles of Operation [PDF] – P.o.O. for brief, and the announcement even has a “poo” joke. The PDF model we hyperlink to above is the primary one on the project home page, however this does not appear to have been up to date shortly.

The discharge notes say the PoO is now as much as 100 pages, whereas the one on the homepage is simply 24 pages lengthy. For info on the most recent developments, the bcachefs-tools git repository has extra present information. Maybe Mr Overstreet is making extra progress with the help of the LLM coding assistant we talked about final month.

APFS transfer

COW snapshots are an vital characteristic in fashionable OSes – the FreeBSD people are justly happy with their built-in native help for the ZFS filesystem from Solaris. OpenZFS works positive with Linux, however it might probably’t be merged into the Linux kernel as a result of Solar’s license is incompatible with the Linux’s GPL.

For some time, it regarded like Apple would additionally undertake ZFS for macOS, however ultimately that didn’t happen. As a substitute, it constructed its personal, APFS, which it launched a decade ago.

By default, Linux nonetheless cannot mount or learn APFS volumes. The Reg FOSS desk checked out Asahi Linux 39, and in 2024, Asahi Linux 40 and later Asahi Linux 41. To our shock, we weren’t capable of mount our macOS quantity.

We have not had time to strive it but, however the March 2026 release of KDE Linux ought to in precept be capable of do exactly that. It is nonetheless in improvement and solely within the alpha-test stage at current, however a brand new characteristic this month is APFS help, due to Ernesto Fernández’s linux-apfs-rw. This too is fairly preliminary – it is solely as much as version 0.3.18, which is the nineteenth launch for the reason that undertaking switched to tagged releases in January 2023.

KDE Linux is an immutable OS primarily based on Arch Linux, which shares vital facets of its design with Valve’s Steam OS 3. Third get together apps are put in utilizing Flatpak – and that is an issue, as Flatpak is especially geared toward launching GUI apps, and invoking Flatpak apps from the shell is difficult. This launch introduces a brand new container-based system for terminal apps, referred to as Kapsule, which is predicated across the Incus fork of Canonical’s LXD.

It will not mount something on Apple Silicon Macs, thoughts you. For now, KDE Linux solely helps x86-64, and it isn’t straight focusing on Macs in any respect. In contrast to its rival GNOME OS, KDE Linux does explicitly support multiple hypervisors and we hope to return and take a correct take a look at it quickly. ®


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