EXT4 Case-Insensitive Directories/File-Name Lookups Coming With Linux 5.2

[phoronix]

Phoronix: EXT4 Case-Insensitive Directories/File-Name Lookups Coming With Linux 5.2

The Linux 5.2 kernel will allow the EXT4 file-system on a per-directory basis to selectively support case-insensitive files/folders...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=EXT4-Case-Insensitive-Linux-5.2

[chithanh]

It will be interesting to know how this code handles corner cases and stuff.

Like the ß (U+00DF) vs. ẞ (U+1E9E) situation, where ẞ has a lowercase mapping of ß, but ß has no uppercase mapping.
So if I have a case-insensitive directory with ß, will a lookup for ẞ match this, or vice versa, or neither?

[caligula]

Doesn't this mean the kernel needs a huge unicode translation library (along with error prone parsing) as a dependency.

[ultimA]

Given that it is being implemented for EXT4, what is the practical use of this feature? I could perfectly understand if they did this for the NTFS driver (compatibility for shared drives), but EXT4?

[chithanh]

I think other filesystems like vfat long had case insensitivity. But it was based on traditional 8-bit character sets, not on Unicode (enabling utf8 iocharset would break vfat case insensitivity).

[AndyChow]

Why would anyone want this?

[Britoid]

Given that it is being implemented for EXT4, what is the practical use of this feature? I could perfectly understand if they did this for the NTFS driver (compatibility for shared drives), but EXT4?

I imagine it will be massively helpful for Wine.

[flower]

I imagine it will be massively helpful for Wine.

they already have a solution for this https://wiki.winehq.org/Case_Insensitive_Filenames

[Britoid]

they already have a solution for this https://wiki.winehq.org/Case_Insensitive_Filenames

Yeh but this would have better performance.

[skeevy420]

ZFS already has this. A case insensitive zpool as the Wine directory might work for what Wine is trying to do.