F2FS File-System Seeing LZO/LZ4 Compression Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: F2FS File-System Seeing LZO/LZ4 Compression Support

Similar to the transparent file-system compression that has been available on the likes of Btrfs and ZFS for years, the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) is also in the process of receiving native compression support...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=F2FS-Compression-Support

[skeevy420]

I hope the comments about dropping LZO and picking up ZSTD pan out.

[DrYak]

Two things:

- (I can't vouch for ZFS, but...) in BTRFS the compression isn't necessarily "blanket". Giving mount.btrfs the 'compress=xxx' option is just one possible way to do it. Other ways include also using the +c attribute, and manually compressing a file using 'btrfs filesystem defrag -c'.

- I second skeevy420 : it would be great if they dropped LZO (doesn't add much to LZ4) and added Zstd instead (offer a lot of different tunable use-cases, some tuning overlapping with the fast-but-light compression of LZO, others tuning including strong (e.g.: offline) compression to prepare seldom-written-mostly-read files)

[discordian]

Bit off topic, but I am still pissed that I have to use a patch to get zstd compressed kernels and initramfs since 2 years.
Thats a pretty simple one time call that ain't getting up streamed, while filesystems just keep adding compressors like it's nothing.

[xorbe]

Too bad openSUSE doesn't support F2FS ... they are too busy trying to rename the project it seems.

[Marc.2377]

Is it still impossible to shrink an F2FS filesystem?

[starshipeleven]

Too bad openSUSE doesn't support F2FS ... they are too busy trying to rename the project it seems.

this is why https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1109665
isn't this "renaming openSUSE" thing kinda old now?

1. There are a bunch of validation checks which are not being backported since they are not linked to a particular CVE as such the stability of the filesystem is questionable even with CVE backports.

2. Currently the filesystem doesn't have a way to disable mounting of filesystems created with newer kernels, containing on-disk incompatible changes. I have talked with one of the maintainers and they recognize this fact but so far no one is working on this. This is a pretty major since newer images could potentially crash older kernels not being able to properly parse them.

3. All in all this leads me to believe that f2fs requires a rather controller environment in terms of kernel/tools versions so is not a good candidate to be included in a community-based distribution kernel.

[starshipeleven]

Is it still impossible to shrink an F2FS filesystem?

yes. Also it's still risky to run fsck on it from architectures different from x86 and ARM (although I would not trust much ARM either, at least personally)