EROFS Eyes Zstd Compression, Intel QAT/IAA Accelerator Support, & Experimental Rust Code

The open-source EROFS read-only file-system that is popular with mobile/embedded devices and containerized applications has been making good progress on performance, showing itself to be rather robust, and has an ambitious roadmap of new feature plans for this RO file-system.

Tianyi Tang and Xiang Gao of Alibaba Cloud presented this week at the Open-Source Summit North America 2024 on the EROFS file-system currently and its roadmap. This Enhanced Read-Only File-System has proven itself to be modern, high-performance, and much faster than the likes of SquashFS:

EROFS has been covered in dozens of Phoronix articles so all of this should hardly come as a surprise.

More interesting is around their ongoing feature work and roadmap plans. EROFS has been exploring support for the Intel In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (IAA) hardware accelerator found with Xeon Scalable CPUs since Sapphire Rapids. EROFS is looking to use Intel IAA to offload bulk data access but currently is hitting some shortcomings with the Intel QPL library code that are awaiting to be addressed. But early results are promising:

EROFS also has on its roadmap support to fully-enable large folio support for compressed data, preliminary Zstd (de)compression support, wrapping up the Intel IAA/QAT support, and upstreaming runC page cache sharing support. EROFS also has an experimental Rust in-kernel adaptation too. That EROFS Rust version though will likely take some time before it's potentially ready for upstreaming.

Those wanting to learn more about the current and future plans for EROFS can see the OSS NA 2024 presentation assets on this great read-only file-system.