F2FS File-System Updates For Linux 4.3

For those interested in F2FS as a Linux file-system to use on solid-state drives and other flash storage devices, here's the latest updates for it with Linux 4.3.

The Flash-Friendly File-System in Linux 4.2 gained per-file encryption support. With Linux 4.3 there isn't any breakthrough new user feature, but some nice underlying updates.

Jaegeuk Kim in the F2FS 4.3 pull request outlined the following highlights:

The major work includes fixing and enhancing the existing extent_cache feature, which has been well settling down so far and now it becomes a default mount option accordingly.

Also, this version newly registers a f2fs memory shrinker to reclaim several objects consumed by a couple of data structures in order to avoid memory pressures.

Another new feature is to add ioctl(F2FS_GARBAGE_COLLECT) which triggers a cleaning job explicitly by users.

Recently with F2FS I did a six-way file-system comparison as well as file-system tests on a USB flash/thumb drive.