XFS & F2FS Changes Are Tame For Linux 6.1

For the Linux 6.1 kernel Btrfs is bringing some significant performance optimizations and with EXT4 there is also some performance tuning. But when it comes to the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) and the XFS file-systems this cycle is on the lighter side.

After XFS scalability work in Linux 6.0 and other XFS improvements in recent kernel releases, the feature work of this mature file-system is rather light for Linux 6.1. Dave Chinner summed up the XFS changes for Linux 6.1 as:

"There are relatively few updates this cycle; half the cycle was eaten by a grue, the other half was eaten by a tricky data corruption issue that I still haven't entirely solved.

Hence there's no major changes in this cycle and it's largely just minor cleanups and small bug fixes:"

Thus with the XFS changes for Linux 6.1 it amounts to various bug fixes, fixes for file-system shutdown handling when hitting a direct access (DAX) memory failure notification, log message clean-ups, and other fixes.

Separately, the F2FS changes for Linux 6.1 also ended up being rather light. F2FS maintainer Jaegeuk Kim also knowledged "this round looks fairly small comparing to the previous updates." This flash memory optimized Linux file-system though has seen some scalability improvements, storing all corruption/failure information within the superblock, improved detection for various inconsistencies, increasing the reserve_root limit for low-end devices, and a variety of bug fixes.