F2FS Preparing To Land Async Buffered Write Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: F2FS Preparing To Land Async Buffered Write Support

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) is preparing to land async buffered write support into the Linux kernel as another performance win for this flash-optimized file-system...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/F2FS-Async-Buffered-Writes

[brucethemoose]

I wonder if this will be another change that requires a reformat? Lots of F2FS's cool stuff wasn't backwards compatible when implemented. And sometimes its only enabled behind an obscure flag when formatting or mounting drive... I have even had to dig through linux source to figure out some of the arguments.


I am happy with f2fs as my laptop's root parition for ~2 years, but it still feels user unfriendly, like its squarely aimed at android OEMs (and server SSDs?)

[CochainComplex]

I wish a lot more distro provider would enable it when using their installer tool. At least with ubuntu, clear and popos i was not able to use the installer once root was formated to f2fs

[brucethemoose]

I wish a lot more distro provider would enable it when using their installer tool. At least with ubuntu, clear and popos i was not able to use the installer once root was formated to f2fs

No distro I have seen supports the partition creation options:

https://man.archlinux.org/man/mkfs.f2fs.8

At the very least, you want inode and sb checksum and lost+found. You probably want casefolding, maybe custom hot/cold file extension lists, maybe some of the extra security features, maybe compression or extra overprovisioning for really slow flash like an sd card. None of this can be changed once the partition is created.

[GreenReaper]

They appear not to have prepared enough, judging by the dissenting responses:
LKML: Dave Chinner: Re: [PATCH] ext4: enable nowait async buffered writes
LKML: Jaegeuk Kim: Re: f2fs async buffered write patch

Perhaps not surprising when the submitter and reviewers are all from vivo. Hopefully they're not already using this in their products.

[stiiixy]

In people's personal experience, Is this a file-system for fastest load-times for games on a nVME? For whatever reason, most of the games I ever played were ridiculously slow at loading assets (4X generally) and never used compressed files like pak's etc. Whilst it's not really an issue these days, I do still like to utilise a FS relevant to the data it's hosting.

I have backups of all my data so could care less if a bit of corruption, which is readily fixed by the game client a la Steam/Lutris anyways should corruption creep in. It's non-essential data of course.

Game saves, however (I still have some from the nineties I resume, which goes to show how much I game!)

[Kiodo1981]

No distro I have seen supports the partition creation options:

https://man.archlinux.org/man/mkfs.f2fs.8

At the very least, you want inode and sb checksum and lost+found. You probably want casefolding, maybe custom hot/cold file extension lists, maybe some of the extra security features, maybe compression or extra overprovisioning for really slow flash like an sd card. None of this can be changed once the partition is created.

I use CachyOS, based on ArchLinux.
I use F2FS for ROOT and HOME partition with automatic compression enabled.

Source:

https://github.com/CachyOS/cachyos-calamares/blob/cachyos-systemd/src/modules/mount/mount.conf#L61

[brucethemoose]

I use CachyOS, based on ArchLinux.
I use F2FS for ROOT and HOME partition with automatic compression enabled.

Source:

https://github.com/CachyOS/cachyos-calamares/blob/cachyos-systemd/src/modules/mount/mount.conf#L61

You generally dont want to use f2fs compression, as even lz4 slows down IO, it doesn't save space and it uses more cpu/power. I am running Cachy too, but it probably shouldnt offer f2fs compression as an option unless its on an sd card.


I think its meant for static, read only android files (where it can save space)

[Kiodo1981]

You can disable conpression in fstab.