BCacheFS is an exciting Copy on Write (COW) Linux filesystem that is being developed by Kent Overstreet. The filesystem is based on cache and is already feature-full, though it’s in the alpha stage. It has worked well for me, aside from one issue: how to go about mounting bcachefs on boot.
I was able to compile BCacheFS on Ubuntu 18.04 by following a handy Reddit tutorial (also saved on this site), but was not able to mount the filesystem on a reboot. While not a big deal, mounting bcachefs on boot would alleviate issues where I forget to mount the filesystem after a reboot, saving time wasted on troubleshooting.
So, after some time Googling and some trial and error, I thought I could cat /proc/mounts to get the correct mount options:
$ cat /proc/mounts
/dev/sdb:/dev/sdc /mnt bcachefs rw,relatime,compression=lz4,background_compression=gzip,foreground_target=ssd,background_target=hdd,promote_target=ssd 0 0I created an fstab entry based on that output but the VM would not boot. I’m guessing that it’s because of the unusual /dev/sdb:/dev/sdc drive that the entry is pointing to.
Finally, I realized that it would be easiest to add a crontab entry that would mount the filesystem on boot:
@reboot mount -t bcachefs /dev/sdb:/dev/sdc /mntWhile this solution may not be the most elegant or correct, it works.