DM VDO "Virtual Data Optimizer" Merged For Linux 6.9

As a follow-up to the article earlier this month around DeviceMapper's Virtual Data Optimizer (VDO) preparing to be upstreamed, it was successfully merged today by Linus Torvalds as the newest shiny feature of Linux 6.9.

DM VDO provides inline dedupication, compression, zero block elimination, thin provisioning, and other features. It's already production-grade with being in-use for years outside of the mainline Linux kernel. Its development began at Permabit more than one decade ago and then open-sourced seven years ago after Red Hat acquired Permabit. It's been a long time coming but it's finally mainline!

Today's Git merge of DM VDO further explains:

Introduce the DM vdo target which provides block-level deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning.
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The DM vdo target handles its concurrency by pinning an IO, and subsequent stages of handling that IO, to a particular VDO thread. This aspect of VDO is "unique" but its overall implementation is very tightly coupled to its mostly lockless threading model. As such, VDO is not easily changed to use more traditional finer-grained locking and Linux workqueues.
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The DM vdo target has been used in production for many years but has seen significant changes over the past ~6 years to prepare it for upstream inclusion. The codebase is still large but it is isolated to drivers/md/dm-vdo/ and has been made considerably more approachable and maintainable.

The DM VDO user-space tools meanwhile are available on GitHub. It will be interesting to see if there's an uptick in DM VDO adoption now that the big feature is finally mainline.