F2FS Proposal Adds Support For LZ4HC Compression
A Huawei engineer sent out the patch adding LZ4HC support to F2FS. LZ4HC is the "high compression" version of LZ4 that improves the compression ratio at slightly lower compression speed. But the higher compression ratio allows for greater storage and maintaining the same decompression speeds as LZ4.
It's quite straight-forward and reuses the existing LZ4HC implementation within the kernel that is already used by the likes of zRAM and Pstore compression. The patch is just a few dozen lines of new code to the F2FS driver.
Early feedback on the patch has suggested reworking the mount option handling. Right now the LZ4HC enabling and specifying of compression level is proposed via a new "compress_lz4hc_clevel" mount option where as it has been suggested to make it cleaner by allowing the compression level be appended to the generic compression algorithm mount option in a similar manner to Btrfs. Huawei's Chao Yu is already working on an updated patch.
It's getting tight to see this potentially in Linux 5.11 but at least it's looking like this additional file-system compression option for F2FS could be coming to the kernel in the near term.
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