Linux Storage News Archives

The Flash Friendly File-System (F2FS) continues showing its a formidable file-system option for flash memory devices, especially SSDs and mobile hardware. With Linux 6.0 there are yet more improvements for this file-system driver.

The NFS server improvements have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.0 merge window.

The Linux CIFS/SMB3 client updates were merged on Sunday for the Linux 6.0 merge window. Notable with this round of updates is a performance improvement for the multi-channel mode.

The XFS file-system may be getting up there in age but there are no signs of it slowing down but rather the opposite -- continued scalability work and performance optimizations -- as well as tacking on new features. With Linux 6.0, the mature XFS continues to age well. Separately, the EXT4 file-system updates have also landed in Linux 6.0.

SUSE's David Sterba sent in the Btrfs file-system updates on Monday for the in-development Linux 6.0 kernel.

IO_uring continues to be one of the greatest Linux kernel innovations in recent years and with the in-development Linux 6.0 kernel is getting even better along with some nice block updates and other storage-related enhancements.

While the Btrfs file-system has many advanced features like transparent file-system compression and built-in RAID, at the moment it lacks native file-system encryption. Fortunately, there are patches that continue to be worked on that aim to provide such functionality.

The Btrfs send/receive functionality allows for generating a stream of changes between two sub-volume snapshots, which can be useful for efficient backup/archive purposes, among other uses. With the Linux 5.20 kernel is send/receive support for the new "stream v2" format.

One of several improvements being prepared for the XFS file-system with the upcoming Linux 5.20 cycle is focused on improving the CIL scalability for systems with many CPU cores.

Coming for the Linux 5.20 cycle is a IO_uring user-space block driver developed by a Red Hat engineer.

Red Hat engineers continue working on Stratis Storage as their means of providing Btrfs and (Open)ZFS like features atop the mature XFS paired with DM + Clevis + LUKS. Stratis 3.2 is out today as the newest update to this Linux storage stack.

Google engineers are working on the notion of "memory modes" for the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) with the intent on introducing a "low memory" mode for storage devices that would alter its behavior. Presumably Google is working on this new F2FS feature for low-end Android devices.

Jens Axboe, Linux storage expert and IO_uring lead developer, released liburing 2.2 this weekend as the newest version of this helper library that makes it easier for user-space software to make use of the Linux kernel's IO_uring support.

Adding to the list of features slowly building up that will be destined for the Linux 5.20 cycle, Jens Axboe has queued up the support for async buffered writes with XFS when using IO_uring can deliver some significant performance advantages.

OpenZFS 2.1.5 was released this afternoon as the newest maintenance release for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation that currently works on Linux and FreeBSD systems.

When an EXT4 file-system is running low on free space (or when toggled via the "nodelalloc" mount option), EXT4's delayed allocation mode can be disabled. This can result in a significant performance hit but now a patch is pending for what should land in Linux 5.20 with recovering that performance when delayed allocation is disabled.

Being worked on since 2020 has been Linux support for user-space peer-to-peer DMA between NVMe drives and yesterday marked the latest iteration of those patches.

EROFS-Utils 1.5 has been released as the set of user-space utilities for the EROFS Linux read-only file-system that is increasingly popular with Android/embedded use-cases and growing container usage.

Following the recent concerns around maintenance for the NTFS3 kernel driver and other developers stepping up to maintain the "NTFS3" kernel driver contributed by Paragon Software, there is now a batch of fixes ready to go for Linux 5.19.

Tuxera has issued its first new release of the NTFS-3G FUSE driver for NTFS read/write support on Linux and other platforms since last August's prior stable release. This new version was issued last week in order to ship security fixes.

The Kernel Recipes 2022 conference kicked off today in Paris, France. Kicking off the event was Linux block subsystem maintainer and lead IO_uring developer Jens Axboe to talk about all of the recent and ongoing work around this major advancement to Linux I/O in recent years.

New feature code for the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) has landed for the in-development Linux 5.19 kernel.

The NFS server (NFSD) changes have been merged into the Linux 5.19 kernel and a new feature this cycle is supporting the NFSv4 "Courteous Server" functionality.

Last week the (e)MMC storage new feature code landed into the Linux 5.19 merge window.

Sent in this morning for the Linux 5.19 merge window were the OverlayFS updates of which the main feature addition this cycle is support for IDMAPPED layers.

The XFS file-system updates for the Linux 5.19 merge window are on the heavier side with this pull being described as "a big update with lots of new code" abound for this summer 2022 kernel release.

Finally for FAT file-systems with the in-development Linux 5.19 kernel is support via the statx() system call for reporting a file's birth/creation time.

In addition to the buttery Btrfs feature updates for the in-development Linux 5.19 kernel, the exFAT, EXT4, and EROFS file-system changes have all landed too so far in the first few days of the v5.19 merge window.

David Sterba of SUSE has submitted the ~4k lines of code worth of feature changes for the Btrfs file-system driver in the Linux 5.19 kernel.

Adding to the many changes expected for Linux 5.19, block subsystem maintainer and IO_uring creator Jens Axboe has submitted his several pull requests for this now-open new kernel development cycle.

Back in 2017 for the Linux 4.11 kernel the statx system call was added for allowing enhanced file information reporting. Since then various file-systems began adding Statx support and worked its way up into Glibc and the like in user-space for Linux finally having file creation time reporting and other attributes. Two separate statx-related additions are now working their way to the kernel.

Ming Lei of Red Hat has published an early implementation of a IO_uring based user-space block driver for Linux.

For those making use of FUSE user-space file-system capabilities, developer Dharmendra Singh has posted a patch to allow for non-extending parallel direct writes. In turn for threaded write scenarios this can mean a huge boost to performance.

The latest Btrfs file-system work on its native RAID5/RAID6 mode is now supporting the file-system's sub-page functionality.

As written about earlier this week, concerns have been raised over the "new" NTFS Linux driver that it's effectively unmaintained already less than one year after being mainlined. Linus Torvalds has since commented on the matter and opens up the door for other developers to maintain it.

Back in 2020 file-system driver provider Paragon Software announced they wanted to upstream their NTFS driver into the Linux kernel. This driver was previously a proprietary, commercial offering from the company but given the state of NTFS these days they wanted to upstream this driver with full read/write support and other features not found within the existing NTFS driver. Finally last year after going through many rounds of review, the new driver was merged into Linux 5.15. Sadly, less than one year later, concerns have been raised that the driver is already effectively orphaned and not being maintained.

Back in 2019 Western Digital announced their work on ZoneFS as a new Linux file-system just designed for specialty use-cases and running on zoned block devices. There hasn't been much code churn around ZoneFS in a number of kernel releases since it was merged back in 2020 while for Linux 5.19 this summer a number of fixes/improvements have been queuing up.

The exFAT file-system driver for the Linux kernel continues maturing nicely with new features, fixes, and performance improvements. The latest Linux exFAT driver improvement worth mentioning is a significant performance improvement from a Sony engineer.

While Reiser4 never made it to mainline and has lacked any major corporate backing while Linux 5.18 is deprecating the older ReiserFS driver for removal later on, former Namesys developer Edward Shishkin continues progressing development on "Reiser5" as the evolution of Reiser4. Out today is the newest Reiser5 snapshot and some performance numbers from Shishkin.

Ahead of the Linux 5.18 merge window ending this weekend, the driver for Microsoft's exFAT file-system saw its pull request today. There are just two patches this cycle for exFAT but both changes are significant.

Last week the EXT4 file-system feature updates were submitted and merged for the ongoing Linux 5.18 merge window.

EROFS as a reminder is the read-only Linux file-system originally introduced four years ago that has gone on to see some use particularly by Android devices. While there hasn't been much to report on EROFS in recent time, they are approaching some new functionality in coming kernels.

The Ceph file-system updates for this scalable distributed storage system have landed for Linux 5.18 with some fairly noteworthy fixes.

The XFS file-system updates have been submitted and merged for the ongoing Linux 5.18 merge window.

Following the recent developer discussions around deprecating and removing the ReiserFS file-system from the mainline kernel, the in-development Linux 5.18 kernel is going ahead and deprecating it.

Chuck Lever III has submitted the NFSD file-system server changes for the in-development Linux 5.18 kernel with a few interesting changes in tow.

Back in the day, 2.5 million IOPS per core was an impressive feat... That day was little more than one year ago. With faster hardware and relentless optimizations by Linux kernel developers, 14 million IOPS per core is the new record now achieved.

Jaegeuk Kim submitted the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates on Monday that today were merged to mainline for the Linux 5.19 cycle.

SUSE's David Sterba on Monday submitted the Btrfs file-system updates for the in-development Linux 5.18 kernel.

It's been a while since having any shiny new features to talk about for FSCRYPT, the Linux kernel's file-system encryption framework that is used by the likes of EXT4 and F2FS. With Linux 5.18 that changes with FSCRYPT adding direct I/O support.