Debian Enabling Support For Booting From Root F2FS File-Systems

For those wanting to run Debian from the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) as the root file-system, that support is emerging.

While F2FS has been available for years and has been seeing growing adoption especially on Android mobile devices, most Linux distributions do not allow yet booting from a F2FS file-system by default. GRUB 2.04 brought F2FS support with its mid-2019 release.

That updated GRUB support for being able to read F2FS root file-systems has been working its way to Linux distributions though also requires enabling the module. In the case of Debian, this week they added the F2FS module finally to the signed UEFI images.

The other part of the Debian puzzle for booting from F2FS is adding F2FS support as an auto add base module for initramfs.

Debian developer Romain Perier is working on making it suitable for Debian to run gracefully from F2FS root file-system setups. This is also good news for downstreams like Ubuntu that ultimately pull in these changes. Hopefully other Linux distributions as well will follow suit with seeing some nice performance numbers out of F2FS and it's becoming quite reliable thanks to the investments by Google and their partners.