[krondor]

I believe you're misunderstanding the problems that occur on a cow filesystem. In fact btrfs already has an overcommit disk buffer, and is already doing many ENOSPACE handling tricks.

Have a look; https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ENOSPC

Reading more for my own interest it seams ZFS uses ZIL to help convert random writes to sequential, which helps with fragmentation under low space. I am curious if bcache, can operate similarly. In addition, I should also point out that this is less of an issue on SSD, due to the nature of how random reads/writes work there anyway (btrfs does a good job of being SSD aware).