Linux Storage News Archives

For those looking to enjoy the ZFS file-system on Linux and FreeBSD platforms, OpenZFS 2.1.7 is now available.

Cryptsetup 2.6 is now available as the newest version of this utility for managing disk encryption on Linux systems in conjunction with the DMcrypt kernel module.

Red Hat engineers this morning for the first time publicly announced their work on Composefs, a new opportunistically-sharing and verified image file-system.

Talked about for over two years now has been a "readfile" system call to efficiently read small files. This should be a win when dealing with small files like those exposed via sysfs while it's taken time to come together and stalled out several times. This week Greg Kroah-Hartman has updated the readfile patches leading to hope that this new syscall might finally be on a path for mainlining.

Red Hat is out this week with a new version of Stratis, its Linux storage solution built atop XFS and LVM that is intended to provide features and functionality akin to ZFS and Btrfs but with the proven reliability of XFS.

In early 2020 the software engineers at Micron announced an open-source storage engine designed for SSDs and persistent memory. The storage engine prided itself on being a speedy key-value store database and there was also a MongoDB-based implementation. Last year HSE 2.0 debuted and the updated storage engine no longer relied on modifications to the Linux kernel and now strictly a user-space based solution. This week the Micron engineers are celebrating HSE 3.0 as their latest work on this open-source storage engine.

"BTRFS_RESERVE_FLUSH_EMERGENCY" is on the way for the Linux 6.2 kernel for dealing with some issues that originally turned up within Facebook's data centers where they were seeing routine out-of-space transaction aborts. With BTRFS_RESERVE_FLUSH_EMERGENCY, Btrfs will try harder to avoid aborted transactions when running out of space.

A set of patches were posted on Wednesdasy for "blksnap", a proposed kernel driver to allow creating non-persistent snapshots of arbitrary kernel block devices. Among the possible uses with blksnap would be for creating backups at the block storage device level.

JEDEC recently outlined an extension to Universal Flash Storage (UFS) for File-Based Optimizations (FBO) to enhance the performance of UFS devices. A Xiaomi engineer sent out a set of Linux kernel patches for implementing UFS FBO in the name of better performance, but with almost immediate rejection by a veteran Linux kernel maintainer.

Bcachefs developer Kent Overstreet on Friday published a new status update on this original file-system born out of Linux's block cache (BCache) code. Bcachefs has been in development for years though it isn't quite yet in a position for landing in the mainline kernel. In any event a lot of feature work continues happening and Overstreet remains dedicated to the file-system's success.

In addition to the exFAT Linux kernel driver for supporting Microsoft's exFAT file-system on Linux, in user-space is "exfatprogs" providing the various utilities for interacting with this file-system popular on SD/SDCX storage and flash drives. The exfatprogs 1.2 release today brings fsck.exfat support for repairing corrupted exFAT file-systems on Linux.

Btrfs' async discard functionality will likely be turned on by default with the upcoming Linux 6.2 kernel cycle when running on an SSD.

Taking place yesterday and today in San Francisco has been the annual OpenZFS Developer Summit. Talks this year ranged from how Amazon AWS is making use of OpenZFS to a number of optimizations and improvements currently being tackled by open-source developers.

Queued up in FUSE's "for-next" kernel branch is a patch worked on in recent months for allowing non-extending parallel direct writes to the same file.

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.

EROFS as the read-only Linux file-system started by Huawei originally for Android devices continues seeing new adoption, including in the area of container use-cases beyond the original Android focus.

Ted Ts'o has submitted the EXT4 file-system updates for the Linux 6.1 kernel.

OpenZFS 2.1.6 was released on Monday as the newest stable update of this ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and BSD platforms.

A new feature being worked on for the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) is the ability to atomically replace files.

Queued up in the Btrfs for-next Git repository ahead of the Linux 6.1 merge window is support for async buffered writes that can offer a more than two times throughput improvement.

The NTFS3 kernel driver providing read/write Microsoft NTFS file-system support on Linux, thanks to the code being open-sourced by Paragon Software, continues to see new improvements.

Since NTFS3 was mainlined last year in the Linux kernel as a modern NTFS read/write file-system driver developed by Paragon Software, it's mostly just been some fixes since then and other minor updates. A new NTFS3 patch series sent out today is at least preparing a new feature for this kernel driver.

NTFS3 as the modern Linux kernel read/write file-system driver for NTFS that was open-sourced by Paragon Software is seeing some late code refactoring and fixes for Linux 6.0.

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.