F2FS Case-Insensitive Support Is Pending Ahead Of The Linux 5.4 Kernel

EXT4 set off the new trend for opt-in, per-directory case-insensitive file/folder support on Linux systems. EXT4 picked up that optional case-insensitive support for Linux 5.2 while the for Linux 5.4 kernel cycle the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) is set to receive similar support.

Last month we wrote about case-insensitive patches for F2FS that provided case-folding support using Unicode similar to the patches for EXT4. Like EXT4, this feature is opt-in on a per-directory basis. A Google engineer sent out these F2FS patches, which didn't come as a surprise considering the growing use of F2FS on mobile Android devices where for conventional end-users may be handy having case-insensitive support to behave to the likes of FAT32/NTFS on Windows.

Those F2FS case-folding patches from July as of last week are now queued in the F2FS dev branch. So unless something goes awfully wrong with the code over the coming weeks, this support will be part of the F2FS feature updates for this file-system come Linux 5.4.

The Linux 5.4 merge window will kick off in September though Linux 5.4.0 won't be out as stable until around November.