"ATGC" Aims To Offer Greater Garbage Collection Efficiency For F2FS

F2FS as the Flash-Friendly File-System for Linux continues to see a lot of interesting developments for this file-system beginning to appear on more Android devices and elsewhere given its feature set from flash optimizations to native encryption and compression capabilities.

The newest F2FS feature work worth mentioning is support for age-threshold based garbage collection (ATGC). This ATGC garbage collection is geared to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the background garbage collection for the file-system by evaluating older candidates first based on a defined age threshold.

Testing of F2FS ATGC support found that the garbage collection calls dropped in the background from 220 to 76 calls (or 162 to 75) and data block movement also dropped from 41k to 12k.

These ATGC patches were sent out for upstream evaluation by a Huawei engineer.